By Emmanuel Edukugho

The strong desire to ensure a successful implementation of the education reform initiatives of the Federal Ministry of Education inspired the strategic re_engineering process at the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council.

According to the Executive Secretary of the parastatal, Professor Godswill Obioma, the Council was on the brink of extinction when he came on board in March 2005 but had to quickly embark on strategic re_engineering and repositioning process in order to key into the various reform initiatives being rolled out by the Federal Government.

At a media briefing which held in Abuja last week, Prof Obioma captured the state of the council he met “My discovery then was that the council, by estimate, was operating as low as 30% of its statutory mandates with respect to curriculum, book and language development as well as educational research for public policy. Its institutional and structural framework for effective operations were weak and out_dated. Development partners and relevant public and private entities have virtually deserted the council. Staff morale was very low. The physical and other operational infrastructure at the headquarters and provincial offices were dilapidated”

He continues: “The funding situation was also very poor. Funds for personnel emoluments could not cover the payment of basic salaries and statutory allowances and the overheads allocation was a little over N300, 000 per month. There was no dedicated provision in the appropriation for core statutory responsibilities and capital funding was also low”

Explaining how his management responded to these challenges, the Professor of Mathematics Education and Evaluation said that their immediate response was to articulate a vision and mission to drive the re_engineering efforts, adding that the Council’s six academic centres, his office and support departments were restructured while its statutory mandates were realigned in consonance with the restructured academic entities to eliminate role conflicts and ambiguities.

The other aspect of the restructuring, according to the NERDC boss, is that the council’s statutory duties were then linked to the on_going reforms.

His words “You will recall that about 2005, the issue of NEEDS had kicked off. And one critical aspect of NEEDS is the need to use education to empower the people, to eradicate poverty and to generate wealth. And we thought that we should situate the Council’s mandates around those extant policies that promote development and reforms.

“And so one of the things we did was to look into the issue of restructuring basic education curriculum (BEC) to meet the ideals of basic education programme. We quickly restructured the BEC into a 9_year basic education paradigm and that was approved by the National Council on Education in 2007 and is now being implemented nationwide in primary and junior secondary schools”

Shedding more light on the research and development activities of the agency, Obioma explained that the Council has produced Teachers Handbook on the implementation of the BEC, Teachers Guides, has adapted the 9_year BEC for special needs learners with its Teachers Handbook as well as over 3000 indigenous sign languages for BEC already produced.

According to him, 9_year Basic Education Curriculum was followed by the development of the new senior secondary education curriculum and 34 trade/entrepreneurship subjects for senior secondary education, the implementation of which will both commence in September 2011, disclosing that Teachers Handbook for the implementation of the curriculum as well as Entrepreneurial Skill Acquisition curriculum for out_ of_ school youths have been practiced.

Giving a scorecard of the Council’s activities and achievements under his leadership in the last six years, Prof. Obioma mentions the carrying out of quarterly assessment of school books and Instructional materials, revision of the national education policy, national book policy, establishment of school readership clubs nationwide, revision of new school books for the 9_year basic education curriculum and teachers handbook for the selection and use of instructional materials for BEC.

Among the long list of the council’s achievements is the development of language Map for Nigeria, National Language Policy, bilingual dictionaries in Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba for basic education, orthographies/meta languages in 34 Nigerian languages, the Journal of Research And Development, school curricula for some of the Nigerian languages as well as the inauguration of the annual policy dialogues of the National Educational Services Network of Nigeria.

The NERDC boss also touched on public policy_ based research activities carried out by the council. These include: predictive study of the achievement in public examinations and university performance, the impact of the reform process on the education sector, assessment of the implementation of the 9_ year basic education curriculum, a survey of the opportunities for inclusive education in Nigeria, training of Education Resource Centres officials as well as the commencement of NERDC annual national conferences.

Prof Obioma also talked about how he addressed the paucity of funds that incapacitated the Council in discharging its statutory responsibilities for years.

Hear him: “We initiated the process of fund improvement and succeeded in scaling up overhead funds to N56m per annum from a paltry sum of about N300, 000 per month. We also soured the initial sum of N100m which was dedicated to the statutory academic activities of the council and we also made a strategic case foe the continual improvement of capital funding”

This was followed by the reactivation of NERDC’s relationship with the international development partners by informing them of the new vigour of the Council, presenting to them its new vision and mission statements. Through this method, says Obioma, UNICEF, World Bank and the Millennium Development Goals office began to make funds available to the council. Since then, according to him, there has been no going back.

This improvement in funding led to improved staff welfare as back_log of outstanding salaries and allowances were settled, staff education and training was reinstated and the council commenced the sponsoring of staff to local and international academic conferences.

The council also undertook study tour to relevant international agencies and institutions, fostering international linkages with African Association for Educational Assessment (AAEA), International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA) as well as the international Bureau for Education (IBE) in Geneva.

There was also physical and infrastructural development in the headquarters of the Council at Sheda as well as in the six zonal offices.

But inspite of all these achievements, the Council, according to Obioma, still contends with some challenges. These challenges include the development, nurturing and sustenance of best practices, globally competitive human resources capacity, improving the zonal offices capacity, linking the headquarters and the zonal offices through Wireless Area Network, sustaining the review and production of school curricula and reactivating the initiative of training out of school youths in functional trades and entrepreneurship skills at zonal and state levels.

Other challenges, according to him, include the completion of the physical infrastructure of the zonal offices at Minna, Abakaliki and Calabar, the take off of the Junior Secondary component of the NERDC National Model School and completion and equipping of its virtual library. But these challenges are to be frontally confronted in order to realize the Council’s goal of becoming a regional centre of excellence in educational research and development, he says.