Forty-four years after its introduction, Nigeria’s disarticulation policy is still forcing children to compete for classroom space that government bureaucracy has kept out of their reach.
Development Diaries reports that the federal government has announced plans to phase out the country’s decades-old disarticulation policy, under which junior and senior secondary schools operate as separate institutions with separate principals, budgets and administrative structures.
Speaking during the inauguration of the UBEC Ministerial Implementation and Monitoring Committee in Abuja recently, Minister of Education Tunji Alausa described the policy as a failure, citing evidence from Kaduna and other northern states where overcrowded junior secondary schools exist alongside underutilised senior secondary schools.
‘We have 20 million dropouts from primary school to JSS. Where are those students? We also found we have 80,000 public primary schools and only about 15,000 junior secondary schools. That’s a one-to-eight ratio’, he said.
‘This disarticulation policy has failed. We will phase it out. We can’t be creating positions because we want to create a director level for people while we harm our education system. It’s about doing what is best for every Nigerian child’, he added.
The minister’s observation deserves attention because it identifies a real inefficiency that has quietly frustrated learning for years.
In many schools, junior secondary students squeeze into overcrowded classrooms while neighbouring senior secondary blocks remain partly empty simply because the two schools operate under separate administrations.
One principal cannot freely deploy classrooms controlled by another principal, even when both schools share the same premises, as children, consequently, compete for space that already exists but has been locked behind administrative boundaries.
The minister made comments with reference to figures, which is alarming. According to him, Nigeria has about 80,000 public primary schools but only around 15,000 junior secondary schools, while roughly 20 million children fail to make the transition from primary to junior secondary education.
Those figures reveal a much deeper crisis than the disarticulation policy itself.
A child who never finds a junior secondary school because none exists within a reasonable distance does not benefit from merging junior and senior secondary administrations.
A family that withdraws a child because it cannot afford uniforms, transport, levies or examination fees is not rescued by reducing the number of principals. Administrative restructuring may remove bureaucratic waste inside existing schools, but it does not create new classrooms where there are none, shorten the journey to school or reduce the cost of staying in education.
The disarticulation policy created an administrative bottleneck that often leaves junior secondary schools overcrowded while nearby senior secondary facilities remain underused. Nigeria’s transition crisis, however, is rooted in a far older and far bigger failure to build enough junior secondary schools, particularly in rural and underserved communities where millions of children complete primary education with nowhere to continue.
The supply gap has accumulated over decades because Nigeria expanded primary education without making comparable investments in junior secondary schools.
As the population, school enrolment and communities grew, the number of junior secondary schools failed to keep pace, creating a widening mismatch between the number of children completing primary school and the number of available spaces for them to continue.
Millions of children are consequently pushed out of education before completing the nine years of basic schooling guaranteed under Nigerian law.
The financial realities facing many families make that situation even worse. Although public secondary education is often described as free, parents still pay for uniforms, transportation, books, examination fees and other charges that become impossible for many low-income households.
For countless families, sending a child to junior secondary school is an economic calculation. So administrative reforms cannot change that calculation unless they are accompanied by investments that reduce the actual cost of schooling.
Perhaps the minister’s most important observation was his argument that the policy had survived because it expanded bureaucracy rather than improved learning. That raises questions about how governments make decisions and whose interests those decisions ultimately serve.
The minister also disclosed that roughly three out of every four children at the basic education level cannot read and understand age-appropriate texts by the age of ten. That learning crisis cannot be solved by changing reporting lines within the education bureaucracy. It requires better-trained teachers, stronger supervision, improved teaching materials, curriculum reform and sustained classroom support.
The proposal, as reported in the media, therefore addresses one administrative inefficiency within the system, while Nigeria’s education emergency demands something much bigger.
Girls remain among those most affected by the country’s weak transition into secondary education. In many rural communities, particularly across northern Nigeria, the journey to the nearest junior secondary school is longer, more expensive and often less secure.
Families facing financial hardship frequently prioritise boys’ education, while early marriage continues to remove many girls from school altogether.
Merging school administrations does little to change those realities, as keeping girls in school requires safer learning environments, targeted financial support for vulnerable families, stronger enforcement of child protection laws and deliberate investments in schools closer to the communities that need them.
Children living with disabilities also remain largely invisible in the current proposal. If more schools eventually operate as combined junior and senior secondary institutions, accessibility standards must become part of the implementation from the beginning rather than an afterthought.
Citizens also have an important role before any decision is taken. State governments will participate through the National Council on Education, making this the period when parents, teachers and education advocates should demand clarity on how the proposal will work and, more importantly, how governments intend to close the enormous shortage of junior secondary schools.
The Federal Ministry of Education should also publish a detailed implementation plan that separates two different reforms instead of presenting them as one.
The first should explain how the proposed merger of junior and senior secondary administrations will work, including timelines, funding and accountability measures. The second should present a state-by-state strategy for expanding access to junior secondary education through new school construction, teacher recruitment and targeted investment in underserved communities.
Government cannot reorganise its way out of an education crisis it has failed to invest its way out of. Ending the disarticulation policy may remove one administrative obstacle, but lasting reform requires building enough junior secondary schools, investing in teachers and ensuring that every child who completes primary school has a place to continue learning.
