Fashola calls for investment in training of teachers

The Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola (SAN), on Tuesday hosted corporate bodies, high networth people and other opinion leaders in the society to another breakfast meeting and Corporate Social Responsibility Awards under the Support Our Schools Initiative, charging the corporate and individual sponsors to consider also investing in the training of teachers.
The governor, who spoke at the City Hall, Lagos, venue of the annual education forum, added that the sponsors should take a closer look at teachers in certain schools as well as all schools and the classes the same way it has been done in the “Adopt A School” initiative.
Fashola commended the Adopt A School initiative, which, he said, has done a lot in terms of bricks and mortars, in terms of laboratories and equipment, adding: “Now, can we move some of those forms into the minds of the teachers and into the abilities of the teachers.”
He said government on its part will not stop in engaging in the training of the over 31,000 teachers who are made up of 12,000 in the primary school level, all requiring to be trained, and about 21,000 at the secondary level.
He said the state has spent over N500 million on training alone between 2010 and 2013.
He maintained that it has helped to improve the learning environment, as there are now better schools, adding that government has also developed a maintenance programme for all the state’s schools.
Fashola said: “There is now a standard template for fixing broken windows and broken chairs, bulbs and so on and in our last meeting we have given all teachers the responsibility to ensure that every teacher indexes in that form what is wrong in each or her classroom and it must be forwarded to the school principal to collate and sign and then goes to the district and then to the ministry of works.
“As we go into this critical curve, by the end of April and May every year our contractors should mobilize and at the end of June and July, contractors would have moved in and replaced all what is damaged or broken and students can come back every September into refitted classrooms.”