Plateau engages volunteers for summer lessons in IDPs camps—SUBEB Chairman

Prof. Matthew Sule, the Executive Chairman of the Plateau State Universal Basic Education Board, says volunteer-teachers have begun to teach children as its summer lessons.
Sule told the News Agency of Nigeria on Thursday in Jos that the summer lessons were been done at the Internally Displaced Persons camps in the state.
He said that the lessons were meant to cover lost grounds by the children in the school curriculum caused by the recent attacks in parts of the state.
The chairman said the objective of the exercise was in line with their mandate of ensuring that children of school age were enrolled in schools.
He said: “Some of these children were displaced when they were writing their examinations.
“This means that there is the need for continuity, so that there is no disconnect when they eventually resume school.
“We also noticed that the children did not have warm clothing, so we have distributed cloths to six camps.
“We are also working toward distributing to the other six camps soon.”
The SUBEB boss said the programme was adopting the conventional school curriculum to make the displaced children be at par with their peers.
He explained that the board was working toward developing a special curriculum for “education in an emergency situation” to address peculiar challenges related to displacement of children or other similar situations.
Sule said: “The curriculum in an emergency situation will be developed to be in line with the national curriculum but with modifications in approach to teaching in places such as the IDPs camps.
“These modifications will include part of the lessons taught in the camps, on how the children can deal with trauma to be handled by our Guidance and Counselling teachers.
“The approach is adopted as a healing therapy to help stabilize the traumatised children to assimilate learning.”
He said the multi-grade teaching approach was also adopted in the camps as the classes were inadequate to accommodate children of same grades in the same classroom.
Sule explained that the pedagogical approach means teachers must have the capacity to handle teaching different grades in a class.
NAN reports that SUBEB also provided writing materials, text books and also items for recreation to the children.
The programme, which began two weeks ago, would be concluded at the end of the summer to allow the teachers participating in it resume at their places of primary assignment.