POLICY

country's foreign policy consists of self-interest strategies chosen by thestate to safeguard its national interests and to achieve its goals within the international relations milieu. It is the aggregate of a country’s national interest which results from the interaction of internal and external forces as perceived by the foreign policy decision makers.1 The approaches used are strategically employed to interact with other countries. In recent times however, due to the deepening level of globalization and transnational activities, relations and interactions have been known to exist between state and non- state actors in the international political arena.2 These relations in their own way have influenced several foreign policies between nation states. When talking about the Foreign Policy of a country, it is usual and indeed desirable to focus on the aspects of those policies that have endured over time. In the case of Nigeria, policies or principles of the various administrations at the realm of foreign relations which have endured over time are usually regarded by writers as constituting Nigeria’s foreign policy; Africa being the centre piece of Nigeria’s foreign policy; non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries; a strong support for international and regional organizations such as the UN and OAU; resolution of disputes through the peaceful means of arbitration and negotiation, etc. However, it is equally true that, one can also talk about the Foreign Policy of a 1 specific administration of any given country. For the purpose of the study,

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.