The Federal Government is set to introduce Learner Identification Number, LIN, for school children right from primary school level to be able to track their academic progress, as they continue their education journey.
The innovation is part of what the Federal Ministry of Education is working on to improve the sector and also allow for higher completion rate for pupils moving from basic education level to senior secondary school level.
The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, disclosed this on Saturday during an interactive session with some journalists in Lagos.
“We have over 50,000 public primary schools in the country with over 23 million pupils. However, from statistics available to us, only a little over 3 million among those pupils move to the junior secondary school level in our public schools, then the question is, where are the about 20 million not enrolled in our public secondary schools? It is obvious that we cannot say our private schools accommodate all of them.
“The issue is simply lack of access and we are working on that. There is need to build more schools and I have met the Nigerian Governors’ Forum over that. State governments need to build more schools to accommodate more pupils and students.
“To also follow up on our pupils and students, we are introducing the Learner Identification Number right from primary school level for our children. It will be unique to each child and they will have the number no matter where they started schooling or later transferred to. If somebody is expected to be in JSS class one and he is not there, we will be able to know the reason why he is not continuing his education,” he said.
Alausa also said the government would soon phase out common entrance examination for pupils moving from primary school level to junior secondary school level.
“It will be replaced by Continuous Assessment, CA. The CA will reflect the performance of the pupil from primary one and even if a pupil is transferring from one school to another, he will take it along to his new school,” he explained.
The Minister added that efforts are on to resuscitate the school feeding programme, so as to attract more pupils to the nation’s public schools.
He gave the hint that the programme would be transferred from the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs to the FME for property monitoring.