‘Producing globally competitive students remains our objective‘

SIJI OLUSANYA, provost, Federal College of Education (Technical), Akoka Lagos shares with KELECHI EWUZIE, the institution’s strategy plans of churning out 21st Century graduates that can compete globally, Excerpt:

What is your take on the current education system in the country?

We all know the problem that the education sector is going through now. The problem of education is from the primary down to the secondary. We are not encouraging students especially in the secondary level do science subjects and we also see that the conduct of our examination is very poor.

JAMB has tried to improve the standard of their examination, but the same cannot be said of WAEC/GCE, they still have a lot of issues like special centers, where mercenaries will be dictating answers to students, the whole world is watching us and that is why at the end of the day when such students enter the university, they just look for a way to graduate without receiving any quality education, they will now be jobless. You may have the certificate, but if you don’t have the skill or what you need to have to justify your certificate, you won’t get job because job is competitive. This is why you have so many graduates that are jobless because majority of them cannot prove the worth of their certificates.

As JAMB has improved, if other examination bodies improve and reduce corruption and examination malpractice, the standard of education will come up.

We have good number of well trained teachers in Nigeria and we have people that can take this country to a greater height, but the problem is examination malpractice that is going on in all the levels of education.

Parents should not assist their wards to engage in malpractice because they are not helping them. Nigerians are very smart, if you go abroad and see our students in schools abroad, you will see that an average Nigerian will beat other citizens in the class.

This country is fairly blessed, I have hope that soon she will improve and move faster than even what people think.        

What drives the vision of this College? 

As far as our vision and mission in this college is concern in terms of producing graduates, we are working seriously to ensure that we produce graduates that are not just self-reliant, but have the ability to teach other youths skills. 

In all our courses like the technical section for example, we use to teach them technical drawing alone but now, we are not just teaching them technical drawing, we teach them auto card, whereby if they know how to draw with pencil, they can now go on the computer to use auto cad to draw and that skill is needed very urgently in the architectural work. People are always looking for architect that can use auto card. Introducing this to them give them the opportunity to teach students in the secondary school not only technical drawing, but also auto cad because that is what is happening globally.

So, we are trying to fulfill that area of our ICT through the provision of internet facility. We are training both staff and students on how they can go use search engines to seek solutions to problem through internet. This is a drive towards achieving our vision and mission.

We have done this for almost all the schools now. The non teaching staffs are the next set of staff that we want to train on the use of ICT.

How do you measure the performance of graduates from this College? 

We have a feedback model where our ex students data are collected. Through this, we keep in touch with them and through this means we share thoughts and ideas on how the school can better train students so that when they graduate, they will be better graduates. Some of the alumni respond through the alumni association and through this means we have been able to improve our curriculum.

What challenge does the college face currently?

The committee of provosts has always gone to the senate to complain about inadequate funding. There are different areas like where we are encountering serious problems. Government asks us to severe some caliber of staff like the cleaners, porters in hostels and security and that they will be paying money to engage contractors. For over five years now, they have not paid any money to those contractors and since those staff are already severed, we have to source for money to take care of those aspect of work that are being handled by the contractors. We severe them but the contractors doing those jobs have not being paid. So this is giving us a lot of problems getting money to do those functions because they are necessary.

However, as a college, we are not are not depending on government alone, we have recently partnered with auto Medics Company to train our staff and students. We have some modern equipment that can detect faults in vehicles. We are equally making plans to buy some digital control, wheel balancing equipment so that with that the partnership we have with auto medic company, we will be training our students in the modern use of the equipment and will also commercialise our auto workshop by so doing, we will be making money that will help us to maintain our equipment and improve on other things.

In the building workshop, we have block moulding machine that can lay blocks by itself so the number of workers you will need to work with that machine is reduced.

We are planning on other areas. Our staff have started bakery and they are baking bread. So we want to make sure that as a technical school, we train our students and give them skill and even allow them to practice what they have learnt so that before they even graduate, they would have mastered the course so that they will in turn go and train other people.

I believe this system will help the country at large because that is what all these Asian tigers are doing. They focus more on their technical and vocational education.

What are some of the long term strategic plan of the college?

My plan is to graduate students who are self-reliant and are ICT skilled so they can be able to compete internationally. I have started that by making sure that all our laboratories are equipped with modern equipment. All our major laboratories are having the right equipment to meet modern standards.

The next phase now is that we are training staff through the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) scholarship to study abroad. We are giving them training so that with the quality equipment mix with qualified staff, we will be able to produce graduates that are self-reliant and that will be able to compete internationally.