Vocational education in Nigeria: A preliminary appraisal

This paper examines the vocational education aspects of the new National Policy on Education (NPE) in Nigeria. The NPE advocates a 6+3+3+4 system which means that the educational system would be divided into six years of primary school, three years in a junior secondary school, three years in either a senior secondary school, a technical or teacher training college and four years in a university. The junior secondary school will be terminal for those who do not have the aptitude for the more academic subjects of senior secondary school and the emphasis at this stage would be both pre-vocational and academic. While it is generally thought that the vocational provision outline in the NPE would help to lay the foundation for a modern technological society, it is clearly an over-simplistic appraisal of the Nigerian socio-economic background. First, the selection for the trainees in vocational education is not usually from an open population in terms of relevant characteristics but from a closed population, those who had already proved to be of lower than average ability, by failing to gain entry to the ‘academic’ senior secondary school. The social implication of such a situation is that trainees in vocational education are caught up in an ‘ecological niche’ in society as fishermen, miners and other direct producers. Secondly, when the elite, the top federal government officials, advocate vocational expansion, it is often for other peoples' children rather than their own. Furthermore, as could be seen from the results of the Udoji report set by the government to harmonize civil service salaries, those who had academic qualifications from schooling rather than vocational qualifications were more favoured. Thus this paper calls for a rethink of the NPE, bearing in mind the realities of the Nigerian educational system and the job market.