The federal government announced plans to cancel the common entrance exam

The Federal Government has announced plans to abolish the Common Middle School Entrance Examination and introduce Student Identification Numbers to track students from primary school through their academic journey.

Minister of Education Tunji Alausa disclosed this while speaking with journalists in Lagos, Saturday.

The minister explained that the proposed reforms aim to improve access to education and ensure better tracking of students across the country.

He noted that the common entrance exam would be abolished and replaced with a more comprehensive evaluation system.

He said, “This will be replaced by Continuous Assessment, CA. CA will reflect the performance of students from primary school and even if a student moves from one school to another, he will take it with him to his new school.”

The minister added that the new system will help address gaps in the transition from primary to secondary education, particularly the large number of students who fail to progress to the next level.

Providing data to support the reforms, Alausa said millions of students enrolled in public elementary schools do not continue their education at the secondary level.

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“We have over 50,000 public elementary schools in this country with over 23 million students. However, from the statistics available to us, only a little over 3 million students progress to junior high school level in our public schools, so the question is, where are those approximately 20 million students who are not enrolled in our public high schools?” he asked.

He noted that this situation demonstrated a major access problem, emphasizing the need for state governments to build more schools.

“Obviously we cannot say that our private schools can accommodate everyone. The problem is simply lack of access and we are working to address that. There is a need to build more schools and I have met with the Nigerian Governors Forum on that. The state government needs to build more schools to accommodate more students,” he said.

To overcome tracking challenges, the minister said the government would introduce Learner Identification Numbers for students from primary school level.

“To follow up on this, we are introducing Learner Identification Numbers from elementary school level to our children. This number will be unique for each child and they will have this number wherever they start school or are later transferred elsewhere,” he explained.

He added that this system will allow authorities to monitor students’ progress and identify those who drop out of school.

“If someone was expected to enter the first grade of junior high school and it turned out they weren’t there, we can find out the reason why they didn’t continue their education,” said Alausa.