The study investigated teachers' strategies and coping mechanics adopted in handling large classes of primary school children and determined the extent of meeting learners' needs in large classes. The research adopted the descriptive survey design using both qualitative and quantitative approaches for data collection. The target population comprised of 175 public primary school teachers and 15 headteachers from Ondo State of Nigeria. The multistage sampling technique was used for sample selection. Two research instruments were used for data collection. The results showed that health problems associated with overcrowding constituted the most prominent of the challenges confronting teachers in their management of large classes. The results also showed that the learning needs of special needs pupils in large classes were largely not met by their teachers. The results suggest the need for a paradigm shift in the development and implementation of education policies for achieving reasonable and manageable class size in Nigerian primary education.
TopIntroduction
In recent times, several unforeseen circumstances have had negative impacts on the education of Nigerian children. Such circumstances include inter-communal wars, religious crises, insurgencies, climate change and outbreak of epidemics, the latest being the corona-virus pandemic (COVID-19). These unforeseen circumstances often compel families to migrate to new areas, resulting in over-population and concomitant pressure on existing social and educational facilities.
The human quest for survival during emergencies often throws up new challenges for education policy makers to develop strategies to improve the capacities of the educational system to respond to new trends in education service delivery. In Nigeria, as in many African countries, emergency situations such as the corona-virus pandemic have necessitated a paradigm shift in the way students, teachers, school administrators and education policy makers carry out their academic, instructional and educational functions. Recently, some educational researchers and scholars have expressed the view that the COVID-19 pandemic should be seen as an opportunity to expand the use of technology in education, in line with the notion of the fifth industrial revolution in which there is expected to be a huge shift in the interaction between people and machines (George & George, 2020; Prasetyo, Nurtjahjanti & Ardhiani, 2021).
In response to the coronavirus health emergency, primary schools in Nigeria were shut down for several months in 2020 because of concerns for the spread of the corona-virus pandemic among teachers and students. One of the conditions for school re-opening during the pandemic was social distancing particularly in the classroom and generally in the school environment. Considering student population and the average class size in many public primary schools in Nigeria before the pandemic, the public was not in doubt that social distancing would be difficult to achieve when primary schools reopened. Expectedly, the need for reasonable social distancing in the classroom and school environment as a pre-condition for reopening of schools has further thrown up new challenges for a paradigm shift in the mode and method of instructional delivery in primary schools.
The problem of managing large classes during periods of emergencies is not peculiar to primary schools in Nigeria. It cuts across all levels of education in the country. It is also a global phenomenon with divergent intensities across many nations of the world (Yelkpieri, Namale, Esia-Donkoh, Ofosu-Dwamena, 2012; Iipinge, 2013).
Large classes at the elementary level of education are undeniably a by-product of government policy of making basic education available to all Nigerian children. This policy is enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution and is tangentially referenced in the National Policy on Education (FGN, 2004). Thus, in an attempt to provide compulsory basic education for the ever-increasing population of Nigerian children, government constantly ensures that as many Nigerian children as available are given access to primary education, even when it is obvious that available human and material resources may not be adequate to provide quality education for the large population of children attending primary schools. The implication of this is that to keep a substantial number of Nigerian children in primary schools in the face of dwindling resources, many state governments are left with the option of enrolling large number of pupils in few available classes at the primary school level of education. The inevitable consequence of this practice is an extremely high and unmanageable teacher:pupil ratio in the nation’s primary schools. For instance, available statistics from the Federal Ministry of Education (2020) indicate that there were 22,050,448 pupils with 453,248 teachers in Nigerian public primary schools as at the end of the 2016 academic session. These figures yielded a national teacher:pupil ratio of 1:49, which is higher than the ratio of 1:40 recommended for primary schools in the National Policy on Education.
The coronavirus pandemic has further exposed the phenomenon of large classes as a significant problem in Nigerian education. The school closure that resulted from the pandemic and the quest for reasonable social distancing in schools as a pre-condition for reopening has further intensified the need for teachers to develop appropriate pedagogical skills for managing class sizes in the nation’s primary schools during and after the COVID-19 pandemics.