By Olaide Ayinde

The Bauchi Commissioner for Education, Mrs Jamila Dahiru has said that the state recorded over two million students enrollment in its public schools.

She disclosed this during a meeting with the UNICEF Representative in Nigeria, Christian Munduate on Wednesday in Bauchi.

Dahiru said the students had been enrolled in post basic and basic schools including Kindergarten, adding the state currently has 5,060 schools and 30,752 teachers.

“We have a number of higher institutions, five that are domicile under the Ministry of Education including a university, polytechnic, College of Education and vocational training colleges.

“We also have quite a number of primary schools, junior and senior secondary schools under the ministry.

“These are all in our effort to ensure that we enhance the educational standard of the state,” she said.

According to her, the state government will recruit additional teachers and strengthen capacity building programmes in line with recommendations to address human resource challenges in the education sector.

“The teachers who want to stay, we are having issues around that and we are working towards retaining some of them even if it is looking at how we can compensate by paying more to those that are located in local government areas.

“This shortage of teachers, we experience more in the primary than the secondary section including quality teacher – pupils ratio.

“We have a very good number of teachers in the senior secondary schools but we are doing very poor when it comes to primary

“This is because we have more enrollment in the primary than secondary, and that also speaks to the retention, that is the dropouts we are talking about,” she said.

Dahiru said the government also embarked on rehabilitation and infrastructure development projects in schools across the state to create enabling teaching and learning environment as well as enhance effective service delivery.

The Commissioner said the government was working closely with traditional institutions, development partners and other relevant agencies to stem the tide of out-of-school-children and dropouts in the state.

Responding, Munduate said that the UN agency would collaborate with the government of Nigeria to address education and health challenges. (NAN) (www.nannews.ng)

Edited by Rabiu Sani-Ali