Emerging Issues in Implementing Early Childhood Care Education Programme in Nigeria: The Way Forward

Abstract

This paper examined the emerging issues in implementing Early Childhood Care Education Programme in Nigeria and the way forward. Early Childhood Care Education (ECCE) Programme refers to the education given to children between the age of 3 to 5 years plus in an educational institution before they enter primary schools. The programme is aimed at providing care, love, protection and supervision of children by well-trained and skilled pre-school teachers and caregivers. However, this paper reviewed concepts such as Early Childhood Care Education, Early Childhood Care Education from Historical Perspective and Objectives of Early Childhood Education. Some of the issues in implementing Early Childhood Education in Nigeria included government nonparticipation in pre-primary education, inadequacy of space and equipment, poor teaching methods and materials. Inadequate professionally qualified caregivers/teachers, early childhood curriculum, professional development, supervision and staff-child ratio. The responsibility of the government in pre-primary education is also inadequate. It was suggested that government should improve its services to include not only giving licenses to proprietors to operate learning centers but participate in providing pre-primary education through establishment of government- owned centers so as to enhance funding, monitoring and evaluation of the ECCE, provide adequate qualified teachers and other personnel to be
employed to manage pre-primary schools in order to enhance productivity in ECCE. The proprietors should from time-totime organize professional development programme for the personnel through workshops and seminars. Quality assurance department in the Ministry of Education should be provided with adequate resources to discharge their statutory functions effectively and staff-pupils ratio should be 1:25 to enable effective learning and management of ECCE Centres in Nigeria.