Why Public School Students In Enugu Peromed Woefully In 2021 UTME, Official

The permanent secretary of the Enugu Post Primary School Management Board, Favour Ugwuanyi, has said that most students in public schools in the state did not do well in the just concluded Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination.

She further explained that it was because they were not computer literate.

Mrs Ugwuanyi also said that the board is yet to access their 2021 recurrent and capital budget because of the absence of a constituted board.

According to her, the development is affecting the efforts of the board to intervene in many secondary schools.

Despite the situation, she told the lawmakers that the board had renovated 13 schools across the six educational zones but urged the state government to provide ICT facilities in public schools to enable the students to measure up with their counterparts in private schools.

She made this known when the Enugu House Committee on Education, Science and Technology visited the board as part of its oversight function on Thursday.

The committee’s chairman, James Adaku, called for massive recruitment of secondary school teachers to enhance effective teaching and learning in the area.

He said that many schools lacked teachers in critical subjects, a development, he added, that had put more pressure on the remaining teachers, who are forced to work beyond their capacities.

Mr Adaku said the call became necessary in view of the growing vacancies and inadequate teachers noticed in many secondary schools, adding that the recruitment would help to fill the vacancies created in the system by retirement and deaths.

He, however, asked the board to advertise the specific vacancies during the recruitment in order to ensure that only qualified teachers were employed.

Meanwhile, a member of the committee, Chinedu Nwamba, frowned at the level of encroachment into the school premises.

He said the assembly would move a motion, use its legislative powers to recover the schools’ landed properties encroached upon.

Also, another member of the committee, Iloabuchi Aniagu, urged the board to imbibe a maintenance culture to save the government the financial burden of constructing new infrastructures.