The Effect Of Government, Community And Private Sector On Early Childhood Education
[A CASE STUDY OF ILORIN SOUTH LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, KWARA STATE]

7. Staff-Child Ratio: Higher staff-child ratios, referring to a smaller number of children per staff, are usually found to enhance ECE quality and facilitate better developmental outcomes for children (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), undated; Huntsman, 2008). When there is higher staff-child ratio, caregivers are able to interact better with children, they experience less stress and they are able to provide more supports to different children’s developmental domains. Huntsman (2008) noted further that higher staff-child ratio makes children become more co-operative in activities and interactions and children also tend to perform better in cognitive and linguistic assessments. On the contrary, lower staff-child ratio in ECE settings will make caregivers to give less attention to children and they will not give optimal performance. This will in turn affect children as children may experience neglect and poor development in all domains. The lower staff-child ratio is the scenario in Nigerian ECE at pre-primary school level. This has been reported in several papers and researches on ECE (e.g. Sooter, 2013; Osho, et. al., 2014). In fact, in a report series to the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, it was specifically reported that classrooms in early childhood development (ECD) centres in Nigeria are crowded, with an average of more than 130 children per classroom in the North (The Good Planet Foundation, 2013).
8. Funding: Funding needs to be given maximum consideration because it is very crucial to achieving success in any educational enterprise. In ECE, adequate funds need to be made available for provision of many resources and activities which include stimulating materials for teaching, training and re-training of staff (teachers and caregivers), enrichment and sensitization of programmes through regular workshops, monitoring, feeding, immunisation, supervision and inspection, report writing, publications, school meals and training manuals among others (Alabi & Ijaiya, 2014). This indicates that the importance of funding to successful implementation of ECE in Nigeria cannot be overemphasized. The sad thing however is that Nigerian ECE is ridiculously underfunded. This could be linked to the low budgetary allocation to the education sector in the nation. Perhaps, this is the reason for the report of The Good Planet Foundation (2013) on Nigeria that spending on essentials such as textbooks, instructional materials, in-service training, operations and maintenance is inadequate. The underfunding of ECE at pre-primary school level in Nigeria has been document in several academic papers and researches (e.g., Osakwe, 2011; Amali, 2012; The Good Planet Foundation, 2013; Alabi & Ijaiya, 2014).