By Ebele Orakpo

Although Nigeria’s unemployment rate has been on the rise with thousands of youths in the job market, some employers said many of those seeking employment do not possess the requisite skills.

Based on this, the Lagos State Teaching Service Commission, TESCOM, saddled with the responsibility of providing sustainable, efficient and effective capacity development for excellent performance in the post-Primary Teaching Service of Lagos State, among others, saw the need to organise a five-day executive training for principals and vice-principals of public post-primary schools in the state who will in turn train the students under their care.

The goal of the national policy on education is to raise students who are useful to themselves and to society.

As Clive Staples Lewis, British writer, literary scholar, and theologian rightly said, ‘Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil’.

The training program with theme: Equipping and Empowering Students for life started on Tuesday, October 3 at the LCCI Conference Centre, Alausa and will end today, Saturday, October 7, 2023.

Speaking with Vanguard at the event, the Permanent Secretary, Lagos State TESCOM, Mrs. Olubusola Abidakun noted that the participants are newly appointed principals and vice-principals who needed to know what is expected of them.

”In any part of the world, you must onboard people because if you don’t onboard and train them, you can’t blame them. 

“That is why even though they have been teachers all their lives, this new role is a role that they must know what is expected of them. There are stipulated expectations, dos and don’ts and things we expect from them.”

According to Abidakun, TESCOM wants the participants at the end of the day, to develop a total child.

“We don’t want them to be teachers that would teach them just knowledge or curriculum alone; there is something called KSA – Knowledge, Skills and Attitude and when a child is trained this way, he/she comes out as a total child, a confident child that cannot be swayed by the vicissitudes of life,” adding that there are so many evil going on in society but “when a child is properly trained in school, he/she will know how to flee from all appearances of evil and that is why at the end of this training, the Lagos State Government will continue to be proud of the teachers because for the past four consecutive years, they have been the best nationally and have won national awards consecutively.

“Of course, in years to come, in view of the THEMES Plus Agenda of the state government which include Education and Technology, Lagos will continue to be the best in public service in Nigeria.”

Also speaking, TESCOM’s Director of Training, Mr. Aina Adewale said the training will give the participants whom he described as directors, mindset changers, arrowheads in the teaching service, executors of LASG policy on the THEMES Plus Agenda, the technical, social and interactive skills and everything needed for them to be effective and efficient in their office. 

He said TESCOM not only trains the principals but also has different levels of assessment viz the consultant and the training department. “We go to schools to see them in action in their offices, see how they run their schools and find out how they are translating what they have learnt into reality. We have the principals’ assessment, teachers’ assessment and students’ assessment as per the training the principals have attended, how it has impacted the school and teaching and learning process.”

On the goal of the training, the Consultant, Mrs. Ayopeju Njideaka, CEO of NurtureHouse Consulting which proffers solutions to challenges in education both in public and private schools said: “The goal is to help principals refocus on what the current challenges are.

“Are we really equipping our students for now?

“The reason is that a lot of organisations say they have jobs but they do not have people who are skilled enough to take the jobs and if you don’t correct that at the post-primary level, it will be very difficult to correct after university education so the idea is for principals to take responsibility for the quality of students they are feeding into the universities.”

She noted that in the olden days, people would finish secondary school and get jobs and pay their way through the university but it is no longer the same anymore.

 “The idea is to go back to that time and teach students the right attitude, manners, equip them with the knowledge and empower them with the skills they require to be able to function in society.”