Government plans to increase monitoring of private schools

Government plans to monitor private schools in Lagos more closely from now on.

State Ministry of Education of Lagos has said that government plans to do so following the collapse of a three-storey school building at the Ita-Faaji, Lagos, which left at least some pupils dead last Thursday. It said it will publish the list of government-approved private schools on its website.

Mr Segun Ogundeji, the Deputy Director of Public Affairs in the ministry, the collapsed school would have been inspected to identify the faults if they had undergone a name search – the basic process of registration.

Mr Ogundeji expressed sorrow that the residents of the area didn’t alert the government despite having knowledge of the threat posed by the building to the lives of the pupils of the school.

He said that parents do not have to go to Alausa to know the list of approved schools once the list is published even as other government plans are underway.

It behoves on them to ask the school if they are approved by government and if they are processing it. There should be documents to show for it.

The general secretary of National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools (NAPPS) Mr Lukman Alaka-Yusuf, in an interview, suggested ways to identify illegal schools:

He said that the government should identified such school with weak buildings through working collaboratively with private school associations to give them a time limit to meet the stipulated standard if they are serious with their regulatory measures.

If they had done so, the school would not have been operating there, he emphasised.

He said that government should set up a task force working with the association to ensure that all schools belong to the association so that the association can be held responsible in case such thing happens. He hinted that the the government could have worked with sixteen other private schools in Lagos to assure this tragedy didn’t happen.

Posted: March 24, 2019, | Category: Local News