Jail for offending parents?

•Not before ensuring that UBE is fully functional

The Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, has warned that the federal government is ready to send parents of school-age children, not enrolled, to jail. At a recent press conference, Adamu affirmed that it is a crime for parents not to enrol their children in school under the Universal Basic Education (UBE) scheme.

He also announced that the Buhari administration had spent, in the last four years, N350 billion on various aspects of UBE, adding that states which fail to provide their counterpart funding may start having their federal allocations deducted at source.

The focus on jailing parents for not enrolling their children in school smacks of putting the cart before the horse. If after 19 years of UBE, there are still over 13 million children that should be in school but are not, it becomes logical for the Federal Government to take a holistic view of the laudable scheme, designed to make every child literate and numerate.

It is, therefore, important to tie, more holistically, analysis of problems of UBE to identification of solutions and goals of the scheme; and to methods for achieving goals via implementation, before rushing to prosecute parents who fail to enroll children in school.

Federal and State Education planners should consider the obvious problems of providing free education for every child up to nine years of schooling, along with understanding the role of parents in the success of UBE. For example, why were there quotas put on UBE enrolment for many years in the life of the scheme?

How much research has been done to understand perception of parents about the quality of UBE schools in different parts of the country? In which states and schools does UBE function favourably enough to attract parents and even children to UBE classrooms? What challenges face the states with respect to planning expansion of access, in the context of absence of formal registration of birth and death in the country, etc?

These questions are not to suggest that parents and guardians be left out of the task of encouraging children to enrol and stay in school. But full awareness of emotional, physical, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions of schooling need to exist and be seen to exist by parents and their children. Education and literacy are steps toward modernity. It may, therefore, be counterproductive for children to be put, as they often are across the country, in schools that even look worse than their homes—roofless, windowless, lacking modern toilet facilities, and basic learning tools.

Certainly, parents and guardians who deliberately exploit children for unpaid labour; or traffic in children for profit, need to be prosecuted.  But governments—federal, state, and local—ought to look deeper and harder into implementation of UBE across the states, before heaping the problems of under-enrolment on parents. In short, we need to know where all the problems are before we start apportioning blame.

Any effort to make UBE function properly requires that all other conditions, apart from ensuring positive attitudes of parents to education of their young ones, are in place: guaranteed free access to school or availability of space for every child that wants to enrol; provision of conducive environment for sustaining children’s attention; provision of qualified staff for early childhood education; good teacher-student ratio; implementation in all states of free feeding for pupils; etc.

It is common knowledge that enrolment and retention have increased in states with school meal programme: Osun, Kaduna, and many others. It is only after there is empirical evidence that access, equity, and quality are assured for all children, that the government should resort to jailing parents, who fail to enroll their children in school.

But the decision of the Federal Government to deduct from statutory allocations to states, the latter’s counterpart funds to complement federal matching grants, is a rational policy. Many of the problems facing effective implementation of UBE are traceable to failures of states to fulfill their part of the bargain. However, the UBE Commission must ensure that states do their parts in full, before parents and guardians are prosecuted.

Further, such deductions-at-source ought to be covered by proper legislation, to prevent litigious states from frustrating the Federal Government’s efforts to achieve goals of UBE. Making public education free and compulsory does not have to start with threatening to send uncooperative parents and guardians to jail.  Rather, it should follow provision of all that is needed to attract and sustain attention of children in the new environment of schooling.

We believe making free and compulsory schooling for nine years effective is the first step in moving Nigeria to the next level: the group of countries that ensure that no child is left out of free and compulsory access to primary and secondary public education in the 21st century.