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EVALUATION OF PROVISION AND MAINTENANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURAL FACILITIES IN BOARDING SECONDARY SCHOOLS

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1    Background to the Study

School is a complex social organization established for the production of human capital (educated persons). The schools input resources are human (that is, teaching and non-teaching staff) and non human (that is, time strategies physical and financial resources). These input resources are obtained, procured, produced or developed and utilized to produce the output (that is, school graduates).

The operational input resources in the education industry are referred to as school infrastructural facilities (Olutola, 1998). The provision and proper management of these facilities have been found to be significantly related to school performance (Adeboyeje, 1999). For instance, Olutola’s (1998) study revealed that schools with adequate facilities recorded greater achievement in West African Examination Council (WAEC) Examinations than schools with poor Educational facilities.

Teaching and learning are very important aspects of education, because the realization of educational objectives depends largely on them. Education involves the inculcation of norms, values and right attitudes in an individual. As such to learn, a person must be taught and to teach there must be someone to impact knowledge and there must be facilities to instruct with. For teaching and learning to be effectively carried out there must be infrastructural facilities such as classrooms, laboratory equipment, playground, hostel facilities, water and light supply. All these facilities help to facilities teaching and learning. Adequate classrooms, laboratory equipment, playground, library and furniture are necessary for effective teaching.

Adequate facilities in a school improve the quality of instruction and striving to create healthy school climate. Most instructional facilities in schools are stale, broken, out date and inferior such that they cannot meet up with the standard of the educational system and can result in low performance of students academically. There is the increasing belief in the efficacy of education as a powerful instrument of development, especially among developing nations, including Nigeria. Consequently, the nation’s school system is witnessing a historical expansion in school enrolment and school programmes.

This would expectedly necessitate a great demand for more school facilities to take care of the teaching school population (Abdulkareem, 2003). Inspite of the importance of these resources in achieving education goals, adequate attention has not been paid to their provision and management in Nigerian schools. As elucidated by Adeboye (1999), Inspector’s report over years have indicated that there is abundant evidence of a catalogue of inadequacies in the provision and judicious use of school buildings and materials for instruction in the country.

In the mid-70s, the Federal Government embarked on Universal Free Primary Education (UPE) in all parts of the country. This programme involved physical development of primary schools in addition to teacher training etc. To ensure the success of that programme, the Federal Ministry of Education Issued some technical guidelines for the building programme which consisted of some prototype school designs (Fafunwa, 2004).

That programme has come and gone and many lessons are obvious. Some of the most glaring aspects include poor quality constructions, unsupervised development and extra ordinary high contract figures (Mulfwang, 2006). In Nigeria, early colonial administrators encouraged the building of government boarding schools so that the boarding students might be detached from the undesirable influence of ‘native towns’ and their good character developed under the continuous control and influence of British school masters (Fafunwa, 2004). The boarding school portrays a school system where students are kept or confined within a school compound away from their homes. They sleep and study within the compound and are allowed to leave the compound only with the permission of the school authority.

Teaching and learning in a school can only take place in school if there is a provision of classrooms, laboratories and library, because teaching and learning involves learning experiences and the interaction of the learners with their environment (Otu, 2002). Land and buildings are capital asses in any organization. They are prerequisites for educational institutions. It is part of good management to have pieces of land available for use. Educational institutions do not just need land for different building programmes but they need a vast area of it for other facilities both for immediate and future use. Because of this, the acquisition of a large piece of land and the maintenance of it is a necessity. For instance, the types of institution whether a

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