Rector of Kwara State Polytechnic Alhaji Mas'ud Elelu in this interview advocates for the introduction of cooperative education where all stakeholders are involved in the development and design of school curricula to align with the needs of the community. He also speaks on the challenges of running the institution as his five-year tenure ends this month. Excerpts:

How has it been since your assumption of office?

Well, it has not been easy. When we came here four years ago, I met an institution that was very old; of course it was established in 1975 and has been growing neither here nor there toward meeting its mandate. The morale of the staff was very low. They were coming out from a prolonged strike that resorted in the closure of the school and dismissal of some of the staff and also some court cases.

How did you tackle those challenges?

The first thing I did was to have a stakeholders' conference. We called stakeholders from different areas particularly the staff, the past leadership of this school - past rectors, past registrars, the government, the council and people from the towns and villages, we brought them together.

After the stakeholders' conference, because I knew there was the challenge of unionism, I brought in the Vice-Chairman of NLC, Issa Aremu. He spoke at length on what unionism should be all about. We brought a commissioner from the government; some past rectors also came and gave their own experiences, and several others including traditional rulers and people from outside.

We now harvested all the discussions and so on and came up with solutions to the situation. We looked at the infrastructure, what do we have on ground? What we should have that we don't have? We met the lecturers, heard from the students. So when we harvested all these, we now charted a plan. We started with the staff. We said okay, we need unity and we introduced jogging every two weeks and then after the jogging we have free day where we gave everybody the opportunity to say whatever they want to say; talk about whatever they think was wrong. So we are harvesting all these.

One of the things that made the morale low was salary, we looked at that too. We organised orientation seminar for all the staff. Secondly we now had to move out to our friends at TETFUND, NBTE and so on to come and assist the institution. So we started getting some assistance in terms of staff training for both academic and non-academic staff.

We also did what we call staff industrial training. Staff were now pushed to various industries to go and learn what was new, the new technology and come back with their log book and impact it on their students.

In terms of students' welfare, we discovered that students didn't have confidence in the system, that they could get fair judgement. So we looked at that critically and said, okay, let us reorganise their student union and in the last four years, we have conducted rancour-free elections.

The next step about student welfare is the issue of exams; examination malpractice and so on. Why should a student be involved in examination malpractice? We now discussed it at length and we found out that they were not too sure when markings were done, just like in any other institution. So we brought in conference marking, we were the first polytechnic in the whole of this country to introduce that and the NBTE asked some institutions to come and learn from us. The same thing with staff industrial training where we asked our staff to go to industries with log books, come back and impact the new knowledge on our students.

The NBTE has taken it up and it is now with the Federal Executive Council. That again is one of the first things we did.

So the conference marking is such that no individual staff determines the fate of individuals in an exam. You may have seven questions you have answered for example; seven different lecturers would mark your paper. So what do you do? If a staff tells you, 'go and bring tithe or whatever', he is telling you a lie. So the students now started realising that they can get what exactly they have worked for. That also brought back confidence and I see it as part of the welfare for the students.

And when the marking is being done for example, we pay. It is not free, we pay staff. No staff takes script home, you must sit down at the institute, the supervisor or director is there and the Deputy Rector Academic is going round to ensure that it is being done. We do it between 9am and 3pm and by 3'oclock, all the scripts are back to our bank. Nobody sees them until the following day when the scripts are back and we give them deadline. And for the first time, as students, when you finish your first semester exam, you get your result before you come for the second semester. It took us time.

What is the way out of our education crisis?

I think one way out, first and foremost, is to bring all the stakeholders together and see what form of education is suitable for this country. What we are doing now is regime-based policy. The first thing is let us come together and see what is suitable for this country, what do we want to achieve, what are we thinking of and that is not far-fetched. What we have now is people going on strike because of money, salaries and so on but that is not the real thing. The real thing is we need to have a form of education that would make this country develop the way we want it, we must go back and plan, have a long-term plan for the educational system in the whole country.

It is good we have it on the concurrent list at the state and federal levels but there are no plans. If we have uniform long-term plan, that plan would identify what are our challenges, what should we focus on, what should our educational system focus on irrespective of whoever is in government. But to get that plan, everybody must impact to it - the community, all stakeholders, the government, the students and that is the concept of what we call cooperative education. We have it in Canada now; South Africa has borrowed from it.

Cooperative education means everybody is involved. You don't just say your child or ward has been admitted to read mechanical engineering or whatever in an institution, what is he coming to learn, is it relevant to your community? Do you need it? Can it work? And that is why we need what we call cooperative education to ensure that the community takes part in developing, designing the curriculum that our students are going to go through.

Everybody must be involved. There must be cooperative synergy. Once there is synergy among all stakeholders, then we would be able to come up with a plan which we will follow for some years and it can be reviewed as we go along.

Here in Kwara Poly we have the NBTE curriculum for every programme. But two years ago, we added to the curriculum, we set up a committee headed by the deputy rector. We looked at each curriculum given to us which is the minimum by the NBTE.

We now added certain things that we think would be necessary for the community where we are, so that when that student comes out, he becomes relevant to his community. So we need cooperative education where all stakeholders come together and plan, develop curricula and the principles of what are we supposed to follow. That would bring us out.

And when we are talking of cooperative education, it is not only for students but staff also. What staff do we need? How do we train them? What kind of staff do we employ? What should polytechnic be for?

Teacher education should be part of the plan. Like we had Teachers' Colleges in those days, if you go to teachers' college, you end up going for NCE, B.Ed and so on and so forth. Then we would know you are a professional teacher. So your community already knows the number of teachers coming out.

Again in our plan, we must be able to introduce hands-on. Like what we used to have, I don't know why we deviated; we used to do woodwork, metal work irrespective of your course. Again that must be reintroduced; vocational training for the development of the country must be in the plan irrespective of whatever you are doing. That is why I want to acknowledge what the state government is doing at the International Vocation Centre at Ajasse Ipo. Incidentally I am a member.

What has been your relationship with the state government?

It is very cordial, fantastic; the cooperation has been there. I am not saying because I am their employee or so but it has been wonderful; they have given me tremendous cooperation. In most cases, I don't have anything to do with the state government but through the council and I must say that one particular thing which the state government has done is non-interference.

They are the proprietors of the school but they gave us free hand to manage the institution. Two, they have supported us. Of recent for example, we have been going through accreditation every year but the government has come in to say that whatever you have spent on accreditation, we are refunding it.