Why government will sustain massive investment in education –– SUBEB chair

The Chairman, Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board, Wahab Alawiye-King, has said that the state government will continue to invest massively in the education sector, train and retrain teachers, and deepen ICT compliance using the EkoExcel programme.

In a statement, yesterday, he said: “As a responsible government, we will continue the massive investment in this sector with the training and retraining of our teachers, making the sector more ICT compliant, exposing our teachers to international best practices, as well as ensuring that our schools become destinations for work and learning.

“Commendably, the recently released EkoExcel 2020-2021 Endline Fluency and Numeracy Evaluation has further justified the investment and affirmed the strategic intervention’s impacts. The evaluation showed that EkoExcel pupils are making substantial progress in oral reading fluency and foundational numeracy compared to their performance before the initiative’s commencement.”

According to him, it further showed that an average Primary 3 EkoExcel pupil is now reading at nearly the same fluency level as an average Primary 5 pupil from before the launch of the programme.

“The evaluation also affirmed that EkoExcel is significantly improving learning over what existed before. The assessment found that pupils have made outstanding progress across all grade levels since a baseline oral reading fluency evaluation in Lagos State public schools in 2019, before the launch of EkoExcel.

He claimed that pupils are now reading an average of 311 per cent more correct words per minute, than their 2019 pre-EkoExcel counterparts, with the most significant gains among Primary 1 pupils.

Alawiye-King added that the study also found that “EkoExcel Primary 2 pupils are significantly outperforming their pre-EkoExcel counterparts on simple addition, simple subtraction, and addition/subtraction with borrowing.

“It also showed that pupils who consistently receive the ‘full’ EkoExcel programme perform far better than pupils in the general sample. Despite the impressive outcomes, the study holds that there is room for improvement compared with international fluency norms and also on some foundational numeracy outcomes.

“Pupils are still behind international fluency benchmarks while pupils struggled with some foundational numeracy skills compared with 13 other countries, specifically more complex skills like multiplication and division.