By Bashir Bello

KANO — The Kano State government has threatened to sanction non performing School Support Officer, SSO in connection with falling standard of education or poor performance of schools under their watch.

The Commissioner of Education, Umar Doguwa who made this known during a quarterly review meeting organized by Partnership for Learning for All in Nigeria, PLANE in collaboration with Ministry of Education, said any SSO found wanting would forfeit part of their allowance.

Doguwa represented by Director, Planning, Research and Statistics, Munzali Muhammad said the state government is partnering with PLANE to review its educational policies in order to improve the standard of education in the state.

According to him, “We have worked on four policies of Kano State namely Girl child education policy, Teacher policy, Gender policy and non school actors policy (private schools).

“All these policies have been submitted to the commissioner for onward submission to the State Executive Council, SEC for approval. And now, we are awaiting the outcome of the SEC, for the approval so that we can continue implementing the policies.

“The girl child education policies is a policy that empowers the girl’s education in the state as regards to their retention, transition and completing the various levels of education. Also looking forward to what will improve the girl child education and remove all the barriers that are preventing girls from reaching the highest level of education in the state.

“The Kano State government has started implementing some of the policies. Because the earlier practice, was that we appoint male principals to girls institution but with the coming of the policy, only female will be heading girls school. And there is a lot of improvement in the schools.

“We call them School Support Officer, SSO formerly known as School Inspectors. Normally, they are in clusters and we assign seven schools per SSO of which they are to report whatever activities in the school. And they are working in line with government policies.

“We are going to sanction those who are not performing because they have been given some allowances while doing those particular job. So, we are going to sanction those not performing either by deducting their allowance. Because allowance is based on productivity and performance,” the Commissioner, Doguwa stated.

Earlier, the State Team Lead of PLANE, Umar Lawan, said some of the SSO turned down the role of teaching for the task of SSO where whether they work or not they would get paid.

Lawan said in some other cases the SSO studied Arabic but were assigned to support circular subjects hence the poor performance.

The State Team Lead, Lawan however called on the government to as a matter of urgency look into the ugly trend with a view to address it and improve the standard of education in the state.