The President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan on Wednesday urged relevant authorities to consider a review of the curriculum in the Colleges of education to attract more enrollment.
Lawan gave the advice when the Committee of Chairmen of Federal Colleges of Education paid him a visit in his office in Abuja.
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The Chairman of the Committee, former Deputy Governor of Bauchi State, Alhaji Abdulmalik Mahmood told the Senate President that some of the challenges facing colleges of education in the country included dwindling enrollment and inadequate funding.
He also urged the Senate President to assist in ensuring that the Amendment Act establishing the Federal Colleges of Education becomes a reality.
Responding, the Senate President said: ” Today we are discussing how we can make our colleges of education more viable in terms of discharging their mandates and by making them to attract enrollment of more students and better students.
“Government, of course, when it creates Institutions, is supposed to provide for them. I imagine that no government will create Institutions with the intention of depriving them of attention or resources.
“I’m sure, sometimes, government gets into a situation where the resources may simply not be sufficient to go round and therefore everywhere will be like everybody should have something to survive.
“That places some burden on the Institutions because it means the Institutions must have to be creative and innovative on their internally generated revenues.
“But I understand that even to generate revenues, you have people who will be there in the colleges and if you have dwindling enrollment situations, that makes it worse because it means you cannot have much from the students who will be enrolled and that leaves the Institutions, especially the colleges of education in a very challenging situation.
“I know that our tertiary Institutions across board face this kind of situation. I imagine that we just have to re-priotise as we face challenges even as families, we re-priotise our scale of preference.
“As a parliament, ours is to ensure that our colleges of education get the right attention, get the appropriate resources so that you are able to run the affairs of your Institutions well.
“What you need to do is to engage better with our committees before budget and during budget.
“We will try to see how our colleges of education will attract students because when you go through the priority scale, most of our youths will indicate preference for University…That explains why the enrollment situation in colleges of education is bad because it’s usually the last resort.
“We should have our colleges of education becoming top choice for our students.
“If we have to reverse the present trend, it means we have to review even what we teach in most of our Institutions…The colleges of education can produce fantastic, not only teachers but researchers as well and that can make them contribute very meaningfully to the development of the country.”
