By Dayo Adesulu

The difficulty which many students face yearly in passing their Senior School Certificate Examinations (SSCE) has been attributed to poor teaching and adequate preparation by many schools across the country.

This submission came from a renowned educationist, Mr. Olusegun Adebayo, who owns Hybrid Schools, Lagos in partnership with his colleague in the teaching profession, Mr. Usman Hussein.

•Adebayo

According to Adebayo, there is the need to teach students preparing for SSCE for close to ten hours daily, adding that this rigorous teaching should be complemented with the exposition of the students to likely examination questions.

He said: “While many schools across the country recorded mass failure in the 2010 SSCE results, our school had about 92% pass in the exam and only three students made less than five credits.

The secret of our success is that while other schools stopped teaching the students at 2.00 p.m., we taught them till 8p.m. every day. We had tutorial classes for them after the normal school hours.”

He continued: “Apart from this, we print out likely examination questions every Friday of the week on all the topics taught the students during the week just to get them familiar with likely questions in the final examinations.

This is a revolution we brought into the teaching – learning process. So other schools should take a cue from this in the interest of the students in particular and the nation’s education generally.”

He explained that if students are well prepared for the exams, it will be easier for the country to win the war against exam malpractice.

He disclosed that it is important for school owners to have experience in teaching in order to be able to come up with useful teaching methods, adding that while he has been in the teaching profession since 1999, Hussein, who read Civil Engineering at ABU, Zaria has been teaching at the secondary school level in the last 19 years.

A graduate of English from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Adebayo commends the education policy of Lagos State government under Babatunde Fashola (SAN), explaining that it has contributed in no small measure in raising the standards of education in the state by rolling out strict conditions to be met before a school could get government approval.

His words: “Prior to the arrival of Governor Fashola, all kinds of schools easily secured government approval. But when he came and saw that the schools did not measure up to standards, he withdrew the approval and shut down many of the mushroom schools.

This has a positive effect on the standard of education in the state because many private schools, including Hybrid, had no choice but to buckle up in terms of improving their facilities.”

He, however, wants the state government to stop the imposition of multiple taxation on private schools, saying that government should actually complement school owners’ efforts in giving qualitative education to school children.