Zulum embarrassed as JSS students fail basic reading, writing test

Zulum made the discovery following his unscheduled visit to a school at Malam-Fatori, the headquarters of Abadam Local Government Area, located along the shores of Lake Chad in the northern part of the state.

According to The Punch, the governor, on Thursday, October 6, 2022, made a surprise stop at the town’s Central Primary School where he conducted an aptitude test on about 100 students at the Junior Secondary School section of the school.

At the end of the exercise, Zulum found out that only seven of the students who took the test could read as about 95 per cent admitted to their inability to read.

The Governor then asked each of the seven students to read from a textbook and pronounce the phrase: 'Social Studies,' only five of them pronounced it correctly while the other two failed.

This outcome gave Zulum a deep concern about the quality of teaching at the school, which was even made worse by the fact that only six teachers were present, out of the 224 on the payroll of schools in the LGA, and not a single one possessed the requisite qualification to teach.

This development confirms the report presented to the Governor in February this year, after an assessment of quality of primary school teachers across the 27 local government areas of the State.

Abadam had been categorized in the report as having the worst indices because out of 224 teachers assessed, only 14 were certified fit to teach in primary schools, of which none of them was present when the governor visited the school on Thursday.

The report noted that 70 out of 224 teachers across Abadam LGA were found trainable, while 140 were untrainable and, therefore, unqualified to teach.

At the end of his findings at the Malam-Fatori Central Primary Schools, Zulum directed that urgent measures should be taken to address the situation.

He said qualified teachers would be deployed to the schools while 70 teachers found to be trainable across the LGA will be retrained.

The Governor also promised that he'd encourage the 70 teachers to return to colleges to acquire requisite knowledge and teaching skills.