Private Schools Better Than Public Schools in Nigeria – World Bank

The World Bank in a report titled “Education and Health Services in Nigeria”, recently disclosed that private schools in Nigeria outperformed public schools across all indicators.

The report said, “Private schools consistently performed better than public schools across all indicators. A notable distinction was in their management of human resources.

“Absence from school in public schools was more than double the absence rate among private school teachers: 16 versus 6 percent. 

“on a typical day, pupils in private schools learned 1 hour 10 minutes more than pupils in public schools. Over a period of a school term, this translates to 22 additional days of learning in a private school compared to public schools.”

According to the survey, private school teachers were more likely to be in class and as a result, spent more time in class on instructional activities than public school teachers. Additionally, private schools have a longer scheduled teaching time per day than public schools.

In terms of input availability and competency, Private schools performed better than public schools, as nevertheless, public schools performed poorly generally. According to the report, it revealed that the availability of infrastructure was three times higher in private schools.

Only 35 percent of private schools had the minimum combination of infrastructure. The same applied to teacher competency, where the average assessment score was 11 percentage points higher in private schools, yet it was only a disappointing 42 percent.

According to the report, availability of teaching equipment in private schools had an average of 66 percent compared to 45 percent in public schools, which was the only case where private schools and public schools were relatively marginally satisfactory in absolute terms. 

The World Bank stated that the major issue of input availability and low teacher competency in primary education cut across public and private schools.

It said “Both public and private schools performed equally well on the pupil-teacher ratio. These results suggest that major issues affecting the quality of primary education in these states (i.e. inputs availability and low teacher competency) cut across both the private and public sectors, although private schools did seem to be able to elicit greater effort on the part of teachers.” 

In Nigeria, a lot of people believe that the quality of education in public schools is nothing compared to that of private schools, as they stated that the low fees paid in public schools can never get the students quality education like their counterparts in private schools.

The standard and quality of education in private schools beats that of public schools in all ramifications, this is due to the fact that the government in a way has neglected the educational needs of public schools.

Most public schools in Nigeria remain poorly funded coupled with the absence of quality infrastructure, which affects the standard of learning for students. The government continues to handle these public schools with levity, ignoring most of their needs.

State governors have also failed to build additional public schools, which has led to overcrowding in most public schools, unlike in saner climes where both public and private schools are well-equipped and built to standard.