The Federal Government has revealed plans to abolish the Junior Secondary School Common Entrance Examination and introduce a Learner Identification Number to monitor pupils from primary school throughout their academic journey.
The Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, disclosed this during an interactive session with journalists in Lagos on Saturday.
According to Tribune, the Minister explained that the proposed reforms are aimed at improving access to education and ensuring better tracking of pupils across the country.
He noted that the common entrance examination would be phased out and replaced with a more comprehensive evaluation system.
He said, “It will be replaced by Continuous Assessment, CA. The CA will reflect the performance of the pupil from primary one and even if a pupil is transferring from one school to another, he will take it along to his new school.”
The minister added that the new system would help address gaps in the transition from primary to secondary education, particularly the large number of pupils who fail to progress to the next level.
Providing data to support the reform, Alausa said millions of pupils enrolled in public primary schools do not continue their education at the secondary level.
“We have over 50,000 public primary schools in the country with over 23 million pupils. However, from statistics available to us, only a little over 3 million among those pupils move to the junior secondary school level in our public schools, then the question is, where are the about 20 million not enrolled in our public secondary schools?” he queried.
He noted that the situation points to a major access problem, stressing the need for state governments to build more schools.
“It is obvious that we cannot say our private schools accommodate all of them. The issue is simply lack of access and we are working on that. There is need to build more schools and I have met the Nigerian Governors’ Forum over that. State governments need to build more schools to accommodate more pupils and students,” he said.
To address tracking challenges, the minister said the government would introduce the Learner Identification Number for pupils from the primary school level.
