18 years admission age, student loan… nine policies that shaped Nigeria’s education sector in 2024

At the beginning of 2024, the federal government set ambitious goals to improve the nation’s education sector.

Some goals were to be achieved within 12 months, while others were extended over the next four years until 2027.

For instance, the federal ministry of education policy guideline sought to address the high number of out-of-school children, inadequate teacher training, and technology integration into school curricula, among other issues affecting the sector.

There were policy statements that generated debate and controversy.

As 2024 winds up, TheCable highlights some policy moves that shaped Nigeria’s education sector over the last 12 months.

STUDENT LOAN FOR TERTIARY SCHOOLS

Nigeria’s first attempt at a student loan scheme came with Decree No. 25, creating the Nigerian Students Loans Board (NSLB) in 1972.

By 1991, the NSLB had awarded loans to Nigerian students, amounting to about N46 million, of which only 13 percent was recovered.

Joseph Chuta, a former executive secretary of the board, revealed that defaulters exploited the scheme’s loopholes to evade responsibility.

As a result, Decree No. 12 of 1988 was promulgated to decentralise the process of award and loan recovery by establishing zonal offices.

The administrative changes, however, yielded little results as no evidence showed the loan scheme functioned any better in terms of recovery.

However, in April 2024, President Bola Tinubu signed the new student loan bill into law.

Driven by the Access to Higher Education Act of 2024, the scheme’s objective is to establish a framework for providing interest-free loans to Nigerian students in higher education institutions to reduce affordability concerns.

As a way of institutionalising the education loan fund, the act provides for a governing board and a management team.

NELFund, as it is known, opened an application portal for the loan scheme in May, at which time payouts to students started with federal tertiary institutions.

As of late October, the fund’s managing director, Akintunde Sawyerr, said the agency had disbursed about N11 billion in both institutional fees and upkeep allowance to students in tertiary schools.

Akintunde said about 373,000 undergraduates had registered on the fund’s portal to indicate interest while 284,000 sought the loan.

The scheme’s past failure, repayment clauses, application procedures, and disbursement timeline have been the subjects of intense media debates.

THE CONTROVERSIAL TERTIARY SCHOOL ADMISSION AGE POLICY

In July 2024, the education sector was thrown into a heated debate after the then minister of education, Tahir Mamman, announced the adoption of a policy that pegged 18 years as the minimum age for tertiary institution admissions.

The minister argued that the policy addressed concerns that many university admission-seeking candidates did not seem intellectually and emotionally mature enough to handle the rigours of tertiary school.

He had raised the alarm that students aged 15 and 16 were being unduly pressured to gain university admissions while some were being admitted as young as age 12.

Mamman had resolved that shutting out under-18 candidates would guarantee maturity in the admission pool. But it would also mean that students, who typically graduate from secondary school two to three years before age 18 due to skipped grades, would be waiting it out.

A component of the policy has it that candidates who do not spend the required number of years in primary and secondary school as stipulated by the 6-3-3-4 system would not be allowed to write O’ level exams.

But stakeholders, including parents, were agitated about the necessity for such a policy when Nigeria needs to create access for its critical mass of youths. Many wondered about how much cohesive thought went into formulating the policy before Mamman made the pronouncement.

A teenager had resorted to suing the education ministry to challenge the policy at the height of it.

However, the age policy, which was initially set to take effect in 2025, hit something of a snag after the minister, who proposed it, was not in office long enough to drive its implementation. Tunji Alausa, who succeeded Mamman, did not waste time to nullify the policy in one of the first pronouncements he made on assuming office.

NATIONAL DRIVE TO REDUCE OUT-OF-SCHOOL CHILDREN RATE

One in every three Nigerian children is estimated to be out of school—10.2 million at the primary level and 8.1 million at the junior secondary level.

According to Michael Banda, the education manager at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) field office in Kano, insufficient domestic finance for primary education caused a shortfall of 378,000 classrooms and about 278,000 teachers in Nigeria.

Faced with such grim statistics, many state governments have been making efforts to address the challenge of out-of-school children.

In January, the federal government unveiled a roadmap for reforms in the education sector that will be implemented between 2024 and 2027.

The policy document, among other things, seeks to reduce Nigeria’s out-of-school children rate by 15 million by the year 2027, cutting it by at least 25 percent annually.

One of the objectives of the policy is to establish learning centres for an accelerated basic education programme (ABEP) across the states to absorb 500,000 overage out-of-school children annually with a specialised curriculum, which teachers would be trained to deploy.

It also planned to operationalise an open school scheme to train 500,000 over-age, out-of-school children in basic skills and entrepreneurship education annually.

The document also seeks to integrate Almajiri schools (which many out-of-school children are familiar with) into the formal basic education system while incorporating foundational literacy and numeracy lessons into the curriculum of these non-formal settings.

In response, some states have constituted implementation committees to revitalise the Islamic education system towards reabsorbing their quota of out-of-school children.

The long-term goal, the roadmap shows, is to prioritise basic/girl education while integrating non-formal schooling into the formal system.

During the outgoing year, the Almajiri Commission underwent some administrative changes and was operationalised to focus solely on reintegrating informal schools and facilitating skill development for learners.

A data repository was also established to inform policy interventions in basic education.

SKILL-DRIVEN SECONDARY SCHOOL CURRICULUM

In October, the federal ministry of education unveiled a vocation-driven curriculum for basic and senior schools to be adopted in 2025.

The curriculum, the ministry said, is meant to address a learning crisis among the youth and the challenge of employability affecting graduates. It includes 15 newly introduced trade subjects for basic education.

The subjects cover classes in digital literacy, such as information technology, and vocational entrepreneurship skills, like building/construction, plumbing, and tiling.

Other subject areas cover hospitality industry skills such as hair styling and make-up artistry.

Also included among the skills to be taught are GSM repair, CCTV installation, and garment-making services.

The ministry said the goal of the policy is to ensure students have market-ready monetisable skills by the time they complete basic education.

It noted that it part of the national skills framework focuses on improving graduates’ employability and life productivity.

The reform mandates students in both public and private schools to acquire at least two vocational or technical skills before graduation, aligning education with modern workforce demands.

POLYTECHNIC SCHEME OF SERVICE

A tertiary school in Nigeria can be a university or an education college. It can also be a polytechnic designated for catering to a defined speciality in technical and vocational learning.

Polytechnic students typically earn a national diploma (ND) after two years, followed by a higher national diploma (HND) after another two years of study, often requiring industrial work experience in between.

In 2024, the system underwent some major reforms, the most significant of which was adopting a “scheme of service” to standardise the recruitment, promotion, and career progression processes for polytechnic academic and non-academic staff.

Before then, polytechnic graduates had endured protracted discrimination in employment, where HND holders looking to work as lecturers within polytechnics were viewed as inferior to university degree holders.

Too often, HND graduates are relegated to the “instructor” cadre, a lower rank compared to degree holders, who are typically appointed as “graduate assistants” or higher.

Also, recruitment and promotion processes varied widely across federal, state, and private polytechnics. This led to inconsistent professional standards and practices in the sector.

Technical roles like “technicians” are often capped at lower levels with limited opportunities for progression to higher positions like “technologist,” reducing motivation among staff to pursue technical careers.

There were also concerns that many polytechnic lecturers lacked some certifications crucial for fostering skills-driven education in alignment with the national skills qualification (NSQ) framework.

The scheme of service, in response, abolished the instructor cadre, enabling HND holders to be employed on equal footing with degree holders. It standardised recruitment and promotion processes.

The scheme mandated skills certification for higher academic roles, aligning the workforce with a competency-based education model.

This model, the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) said, would check the inflow of unqualified staff from universities.

Some of the scheme’s clauses, however, quickly became the subject of debates, protests, and strikes from among affected stakeholders.

Academic staff criticised provisions that they claimed undermine equity, such as discriminatory entry points for HND holders compared to degree holders and restrictions on the eligibility of HND holders for administrative roles like registrars and bursars.

The NBTE later suspended the scheme to address the concerns raised by stakeholders.

FEDERAL UNIVERSITY FINANCING

Despite the creation of student loans, federal tertiary institution financing witnessed a series of attempts at policy adjustment.

In the last quarter of 2024, the government’s integrated financial management information system (GIFMIS), was ushered in as an alternative to the contentious integrated personnel and payroll information system (IPPIS) payroll software for salary disbursements to academic staff in federal tertiary institutions.

The IPPIS was introduced in 2006 to manage public sector salaries. Administered by the office of the accountant-general of the federation, the platform accommodated federal tertiary institutions in 2016.

It became the subject of protests and strikes for many public tertiary institutions over alleged unilateral manipulation and fraud.

Administrators across universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education argued that the IPPIS’s centralised nature eroded the powers of provosts and governing councils since the head of the civil service often had to determine which workers were employed and when.

Federal tertiary institutions had proposed the unified treasury accounting system (UTAS) as an alternative. But the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) said the UTAS had failed three of its integrity tests.

In October, the federal government finally rolled out guidelines for the removal of federal tertiary institutions from the IPPIS.

The government said institutions would now self-process their payroll through GIFMIS and forward it to the IPPIS department in the office of the accountant-general.

This arrangement was rejected by university academic staff, who believed that the GIFMIS is another “appendage” of the IPPIS.

The federal government partially acceded to calls for increased financial autonomy for universities.

It exempted third-party research grants from being paid into the federal account, allowing universities and research institutions to manage these funds independently.

Universities were also allowed to manage their endowment funds independently through commercial banks, enabling the financial flexibility required to invest these funds and turn a profit.

EDUCATION TAX

In October, President Bola Tinubu asked the national assembly to consider and pass four tax reform bills.

The bills include the Nigeria Tax Bill, the Nigeria Tax Administration Bill, the Nigeria Revenue Service Establishment Bill, and the Joint Revenue Board Establishment Bill.

A part of the tax administration bill proposes eliminating the education tax, to be replaced by a “development levy”.

This would effectively disrupt the revenue stream of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), an agency that has been the major source of funding for infrastructure development in many public tertiary institutions over the last decade.

Established in 2011, TETFund monitors the disbursement of education tax to public tertiary institutions in Nigeria.

This education fund was, for over a decade, driven by a two and later three percent deduction from the assessable profit of registered companies.

It is collected by the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) (which will be replaced, if the bills are passed) and annually remitted to TETFund for infrastructure, research, and training in public tertiary institutions.

Replacing the education tax as part of the proposed reforms meant an introduction of a development levy in phases, starting at four percent for 2025/2026 and then three percent for 2027, 2028, and 2029.

About 50 percent of the monies accruing to the levy would go to TETFund in 2025 and 2026.

TETFund’s share will be upped to 66 percent in 2027, 2028, and 2029. Then, the agency would cease to get any revenue from 2030.

From 2030, the development levy will further decrease to two percent, solely meant to fund the federal government’s student loan scheme.

As of this writing, what would become of TETFund is yet to be fully understood.

However, education stakeholders have heavily criticised the proposed reforms as an attempt to scuttle a major source of infrastructure funding for already struggling public tertiary institutions and commodify education.

THE SMART SCHOOLS PROJECT

In October 2021, the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Korea International Co-operation Agency (KOICA) to assist Nigeria in the development of the “smart schools”.

The project was intended to build and equip the “smart schools” across the country with modern instructional and vocational materials.

Valued at several million US dollars, the smart school concept was designed to increase the capacity of teachers to develop and use ICT content/materials.

The project posted more progress in 2024, as 26 schools were marked as completed as of August 2014.

As of October, UBEC said the project had trained 250 teachers/administrators, established a teacher learning community, produced operational guidelines for smart school education, and built state-of-the-art studios in six of the facilities across Nigeria.

The commission said the initiative aims to revolutionise the learning environment by providing teachers and students with access to digital resources and enhancing the quality of education through innovative teaching methods and personalised learning experiences.

THE ANTI-HARASSMENT BILL

In October, an anti-harassment bill intended to address sexual harassment within Nigeria’s tertiary institutions gained momentum in the house of representatives.

The proposed legislation defines harassment broadly to include unwelcome sexual advances, demands for favours, hostile environments, stalking, and the distribution of explicit materials.

The bill  categorises the offences into serious and lesser violations, with penalties ranging from two to 14 years in prison without the option of fines.

The bill imposes accountability on institutional leaders by requiring them to establish anti-harassment committees composed of diverse members, including women, students, and non-academic staff.

Failure to set up or act on complaints promptly can lead to fines or imprisonment, according to the bill.

Additionally, the bill empowers students to challenge committee decisions in court, ensuring a pathway to justice beyond the institution.

It mandates the reporting and addressing of complaints within strict timeframes to prevent institutional negligence.

Despite the passage of the bill at the house of representatives, its fate depends on senate approval and presidential assent.

Advocacy groups and civil society organisations have intensified pressure to ensure its implementation, given its long history of delays since 2016 when the bill was introduced.