The National Coordinator of SERVICOM, Mrs Nnenna Akajemeli, has said that facilities that enhance effective delivery of learning and teaching were inadequate in most of the country’s Colleges of Education while standards for various services are not clearly spelt out.
Akajemeli said this in Abuja at the presentation of SERVICOM Compliance Evaluation (SCE) Report to the Executive Secretary, National Commission for Colleges of Education, Prof. Muhammadu Bappa-Aliyu, after the evaluation of 21 Federal Colleges of Education across the country and the College of Education Zuba by SERVICOM evaluators.
She noted that teaching facilities such as public address system, Projectors and modern teaching aids were not available in most of the Colleges as at the time of evaluation while lecture halls, staff quarters, hostel and toilet facilities cannot be said to be adequate.
Mrs Akejemeli also pointed out that Customer satisfaction surveys are not carried out regularly in all the evaluated colleges to test and determine the quality of services delivered to students such as lectures, registration and admission procedures, noting that this does not allow management of the Institutions to easily identify areas of service failure.
According to her, summary of complaints received from students over a period of time at the colleges evaluated were not published and placed in public domain, “this means that students are not aware that their complaints are acted upon and used for service improvement purposes”
“There was no system in place for monitoring initial and subsequent waiting times in most of the evaluated Colleges of Education e.g. how long it takes for transcripts to be ready for collection, this keeps the students in suspense and causes endless waiting and anxiety. This could also delay customer’s personal development plans and thus great inconvenience to students”, she added
Akajemeli who explained that the rating of the colleges were done based on evidence gathered through interviews and discussion with students, staff, management and partners of the institutions as well as from desk research and general observations, called for implementation of the recommendations of SERVICOM which are contained in the reports.
She noted that the overall objective of the evaluation was to identify service delivery gaps in the Institutions and make recommendations on how to mitigate them in each of the Institutions for continuous service improvement by their Management and by the Commission.
The Executive Secretary, National Commission for Colleges of Education, Prof. Muhammadu Bappa-Aliyu, promised to work on the recommendation of the report saying “having gone through the evaluation report, we hope to immediately incorporate these service indicators in our institutions.
Provost of the Federal College of Education, Okene, Kogi Dr Umar Hassan who was among Provosts in attendance at the Presentation, said that most of the problems highlighted were due to inadequate funding, explaining that once the funding problems were addressed, most of the issues would be resolved accordingly.
