Follow Us on Google
From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said it has adopted the child-play approach to impart knowledge and basic skills to children up to five years old, under the Early Child Education (ECE) system.
UNICEF said the new approach has proved to be more effective over other approaches adopted in the past, as it has helped to encourage children to desire formal education, keep them in school and also increase their desire to further their education beyond the basic level.
The UN agency, in addition to that, confirmed that children enrolled in the ECE system tend to learn well and faster and also perform better, academically and otherwise, than their contemporaries who never passed through the ECE programme.
UNICEF education specialist, Yetunde Oluwatosin, told journalists at a two-day media dialogue in Sokoto recently that the review of the ECE implementation in Sokoto State indicated that child enrollment in school has significantly increased since the play-base approach was adopted and they were provided with play items and other things, including meals, that makes school fun for them.
She said data indicated more parents were increasingly developing interest in the ECE, following intensified advocacy and enlightenment, particularly in rural communities, but lamented that insufficient number of teachers would be the major problem in attending to the children.
Oluwatosin made reference to the report of the 2018 National Personnel Audit conducted by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), which indicated that Nigeria had over seven million learners in the ECE and only 154,000 available teachers.
“This pupils/teachers ratio is obviously low, and we must do something to improve this. This disparity is there, and we are still far behind in achieving the SDG goals,” she said.
She called on the Federal Government to take steps to reposition the ECE system in Nigeria to make it a strong and resilient national system in development and humanitarian context.
Asmau Mohammed, an ECE teacher at Magaji Abdullahi Nursery School, Shagari LGA, Sokoto State, confirmed that ECE has been a magical approach that had encouraged children to desire school and learn along the way.
She confirmed that the play-base one-year pre-primary curriculum has assisted the children to improve their literacy level, in addition to other knowledge acquired.
Another teacher, Zara Omode, said the challenge they was stoppage of the school feeding programme for the children. She said: “We have about 150 children in this ECE centre, but they were more than that when food was being provided for the children. Some come to school in the morning, go home for breakfast or lunch, and never return to school again.”
She appealed for the reintroduction of school feeding programme, stressing that it has helped to lure the children to school and keep them in school.
Headmistress of the school, Kulu Bala Shagari, said insufficient number of teachers was a big challenge for them, and those teaching were not paid well.
She appealed to government to improve the welfare of teachers to make them give their best in the moulding of the destinies of future generations.
UNICEF communication specialist, Dr. Geoffrey Njoku, tasked the Nigerian media to create space for issues relating to children, stressing that ECE remains the bedrock of a child’s development, and attention must be focused on ensuring that children are exposed to learning at an early stage for proper brain development.
He charged Nigerians to ask people seeking political office in the forthcoming elections what they plan to do to address the concerns about the rights of children, one of them being the issue of early childhood education, not given adequate attention in the country.
The country director of the Early Childhood Development Initiative (ECDI) in Nigeria, Dr. Amy Panyi, said there was a need to promote early childhood education to open up a world for children where everything is possible.
According to her, pre-primary education is the best way for a child to learn, adding that the play-based classes allow children to explore, innovate, learn to collaborate and build their confidence in critical thinking, among others.
Also, the director of ECE in the Sokoto State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Faruk Umar, disclosed that the state has over 500 ECE centres in some public schools across the state, while being the only state in Nigeria to establish a full-fledged department of Early Child Education.
