Candidates sitting for the West African Examination Council (WAEC) and the National Examination Council (NECO) will henceforth be taking entrepreneurship skills as compulsory subjects.
According to the President, International Bureau of Education (IBE)and Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), Professor Godswill Obioma who spoke in Abuja, noted that this became necessary, following the transformation agenda of the current administration.
The development entails that the exams councils would be administering downstream vocational skills like barbing, hair dressing, garment making among other as subjects for the said exams for candidates who wish to acquire secondary school certificates.
He said that there is a need for a reformation of the educational system and a restoration of education quality at all levels as directed by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2010 at a stakeholders meeting, which the president attended personally.
“One of the windows of opportunity in that presidential stakeholders’ forum was the issue of content of education. If you think about reforming education you must think of what children should learn in school. The whole idea of education is to change behaviour in a positive manner and to enable people acquire competence to survive in their world of work”, Obioma stated.
NERDC, according to him, has critical mandate and one of them is to develop school curriculum and to conduct research for public policy, while “the other is to create avenue for language development and, of course, to create avenues for developing resources and textbooks.
“So, with respect to latching on to what Mr. President has done, with respect to educational development, my agency creates the area of contents of education or what is now referred to knowledge production”, he added.
Obioma said, “I was part of the Presidential Task Team on Education (PTTE) that worked on the report of Mr. President’s Stakeholders’ Forum. One critical thing that came out sharply was that there was need to ensure that what we teach to our children is internationally competitive and aligned with best practice.
“So, at various levels of education we should teach them what is socially compliant in our context that would resolve our problems. We should also teach them what would make them compare with their peers elsewhere.
“I could say that, following the transformation from that stakeholders’ forum, we have created a nine-year basic education curriculum which is being acknowledged at the highest level of UNESCO, International Bureau for Education as globally competitive and it is a best practice for Africa. There is entrepreneurship, there is education and training, and there is basic science and technology.