Press Releases

‘All Schools Must Meet Minimum Standards’- LASG

Feb 10, 2008 - The Lagos State Government at the weekend defended its closure of substandard schools insisting that all private and public schools in the state must meet minimum standards of facilities and teaching in the best interest of children who are the leaders of tomorrow.

In a press statement yesterday, the Lagos State Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Barrister Opeyemi Bamidele, said the state would continue its ongoing aggressive rehabilitation, reconstruction and re-equipping of public primary and secondary schools while at the same time ensuring that private schools meet the required standard.

He described as untenable the argument that substandard schools with unqualified teachers should be allowed to thrive because there are insufficient number of public schools pointing out that “this is like saying that substandard clinics and fake doctors should be allowed to freely endanger lives until government can provide enough public hospitals.”

Noting that private schools will always be needed to complement public ones in a Mega city like Lagos , Bamidele expressed satisfaction that many of the affected schools have taken steps to regularize their operations by improving on their current standard in accordance with stipulated regulations.

According to him “ the rot and decay in the public education system was due to the gross neglect of over two decades particularly between 1979 and 1999 but that deplorable situation has been aggressively addressed over the last eight and half years. We will notice, for example, that the sight of children in public schools carrying desks and chairs to and from school is no more common as it was before 1999.”

Continuing he said the state government had earmarked over N6 billion in this year’s budget to construct and furnish 4000 new classrooms in public schools while teachers in these schools are being intensively re-trained to upgrade their skills and enhance their performance.

Bamidele urged proprietors of sub-standard schools to team up and pool resources thus enhancing their capacity to run schools with better facilities as well as employ qualified teachers.

He said further that the Lagos State Micro-finance Institution, which will take off soon, will enable small scale school proprietors’ access credit at minimal interest rate to establish new schools or improve existing ones.