ASSESSMENT OF THE EFFECT OF UNIVERSAL BASIC EDUCATION POLICY ON PUBLIC JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN EDO STATE: A CASE STUDY OF SELECTED SCHOOLS IN EGOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA

This research focused on the impact of the universal basic education policy on public junior secondary schools in Edo State. The aim was to investigate how the universal basic education has improved instructional and learning materials availability in public Junior Secondary Schools in Edo State to meet modern pedagogy. The survey research method was adopted. The researcher employed the use of both primary and secondary sources of data collection. The study has a population which comprises four different UBE schools in Egor Local Government Area. Which include the following; Egor Secondary School (1,706), Asoro Grammar School (1,812), Use Junior Secondary School (531) and Evbotubu Grammar School (1,669). To ensure adequate representativeness based on the size of the study population, the study opted to drawing the sample size that will be representative through the method of percentaging. Thus, twenty percent (20%) sampling was drawn from each of the four selected UBE schools in Egor Local Government Area, which upon calculation amount study sample size of 946. Furthermore, the sampling technique adopted for this study is the stratified random sampling technique in which respondents was selected using certain conditions such as gender, class, age and teacher’s qualifications etc. Furthermore, both descriptive and inferential statistics methods of analysis were adopted. The descriptive statistics include the use of frequency distribution tables and simple percentages to get the figures of different categories of the responses to the questionnaire. The inferential statistics on the other hand was meant to measure the type of relationship between variables. The type of inferential statistics that was deployed is the Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation (r) Coefficient analytical tool. These were done using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 22.0 version) software at 0.5 level of significance. It was found that the universal b sic education policy has made textbooks available in all subject areas in public junior secondary schools. The study also established that the universal basic education policy provides standard white or black boards with accompanying markers, chalks, and customized dusters among others. The study further show that the universal basic education policy also provides textbooks in the noncore subject areas of home economics, and fine art among others. On the issue of reduced number of out-of-school students, the study observed by reason of its retrieved field data and subsequent analysis that there exists a strong relationship between the UBE policy and reduced number of out-of-school students of public junior secondary schools in Edo State.