Assessment of Supervisory Role Performance in Primary Schools

Assessment of Supervisory Role Performance in Primary Schools.

INTRODUCTION

Background to the Study

Education is the biggest instrument for economic progress,  social mobilization, political survival and effective national development of any country. Thus, it constitutes the single largest enterprise in a country like Nigeria.

Consequently, Nigeria has witnessed so many changes in the management of its educational system. It started by the missionaries and with the independence in 1960, it was felt that the missionary education was deficient and not quite adequate to meet our changing societal needs.

This prompted the government’s interest to get properly involved in this management of the education industry (Nwankwo, 1981). Education remains a social process in capacity building and maintenance of society for decades. It is a weapon of acquiring skills, relevant knowledge and. habits for surviving in the changing world.

It makes one to benefit oneself and other members of one’s society, Encyclopedia Americana vol. 9 (1989:642) shows the social functions of education is to help an individual to become a more effective member of the society by passing to him the collective experience of the past and present, it is also to make him to lead a more satisfying and productive life by preparing him to handle new experiences successful.

In her National policy on education (FME, 1998) Nigeria has rightly recognized education as the instrument for excellence for national development and that teachers and supervisors hold the key to the door of some education.

The Nigerian education law stated that schools must be inspected. This is reasonable because government always puts a significant amount of public fund on education.

It follows therefore that how the resources are utilized to achieve the objectives of education in these schools must be ascertained. This is accountability, which the present civilian government will like the supervisors and Inspectors to imbibe.

Statement of the Problem

There is definitely no doubt that supervision has made great advances for over hundred years that the system of supervision has been working in Nigeria, yet it is still considered not as a spoke, but as a clog in the wheel of progress of education.

It was expected that with the grant of freedom, our supervision practices would improve, but still recently school supervision has not attained to the new conception. In the words of Lawrence “School supervision is often criticized as been hastily, perfunctory and unsympathetic.

The supervising officers were anxious only to pick holes, not mend or end them. There is only “troublesome interference” and nothing more. Education officers are interested in only in statistics passes in examination, furniture, and daily attendance.

The negative side is accentuated rather than the positive. Criticism of the destructive side only is offered. The education officer is a detective trying to detect a few mistakes in the school.

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