EMMANUEL EKURI AND JOSEPH O. ODEY
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS
UNIVERSITY OF CALABAR, NIGERIA
Abstract.
The purpose of the study was to evaluate the extent to which public primary schools comply with laid down guidelines for the implementation of Universal Basic Education programme (UBE) in Cross River State, Nigeria, and to find out the extent of compliance by schools. The survey research design was adopted for the study. A total of 287 public primary schools were used in the study. The stratified random sampling method was used in school selection. As an evaluation study, Template was used ?to collection data ?about pupils, attendance , and distribution of teachers according to teaching subject, educational qualification and subject of specialization, while ?simple percentages was used to summarize the data. Results indicated that: (a) complied substantially with the requisite educational qualification for the recruitment of teachers as 87 percent of the teachers possess the requisite teaching qualification. (b) Operated at low teacher-pupils ratio as 63 percent of the schools operated at 1:34 below the approved 1:35 teacher: pupil?s ratio. (c) the number of specialist teachers per subject per schools particularly in subject areas like Mathematics, Primary science, Computer Science and local language were not adequate, Teachers were not assigned teaching job on the bases of their area of specialization. Based on these findings, it was recommended among others that recruitment of teachers should be based on subject area of specialization particularly in subjects such as local language, creative art, computer science and mathematics. Areas for further research have been addressed.
Keywords: Teacher-pupils ratio; Specialist subject teachers; Teacher factor; Implementation of Universal Basic Education.
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