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Abstracts and Bios

Migrations to Schools in Western Nigeria

Samuel Akinrinola Akintunde, Department of Social Studies, Adeyemi College of Education, Nigeria

The increasing difficulties of making available education as a social service to the urban and rural population brought the necessity to examine some of the operative and motivational factors that initiated the choice of migrations to schools. Data generated from identified sources with quantitative discussions from related literature on intra and inter city movements to schools in southwest Nigeria were examined in this study. An effort was made to review the studies done in this respect and to deduce implications of the findings from such studies carried out. It was concluded that the convergent view of the studies is that the number of primary schools could be said to be adequate but the spatial distributions in villages and hamlets are in many cases lopsided. This makes some children to travel distances longer than necessary where school is not located within and outside the vicinity of the neighborhood. And in some unfortunate cases more private schools abound in a locality than public schools thereby pushing the poor parents whose children could not get vacancies in the already crowded neighborhood public schools to seek admission for them in a farther locations. Invariably, while, public schools are oversupplied in some wards, private schools are oversupplied. It is observed that the locational policy of primary schools by government and private owners is not based on proper feasibility studies. Private schools are abundant where people could not afford their costs and public schools are over-concentrated in other areas. It is found that the in-depth knowledge of the mobility pattern of children is of serious implication for urban planning for a balanced distribution and to attract and maintain a sufficiently large volume of patronage so that the facilities or school plant is used at optimum level. It is hoped that the results will provide information to urban development planners to adequately advice both government and private developers and stakeholders in the establishments of primary schools on where to site new schools in our expanding urban centers. This will also remove or reduce complaints of local marginalization between or among wards and engender communal understanding through which unity could be fostered among the various localities.