Deregulation of Educational Services and Quality Assurance in Public Secondary Schools in Rivers State, Nigeria
Author: MOSES, Zechariah Olilanya Promise (PhD) and NWOGU, U.J (PhD), Nigeria
Abstract:The study examined deregulation of educational services and quality assurance in public secondary schools in Rivers State. Two research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted the correlational design as the working design. The population comprised 247 principals from the 247 public secondary schools in Rivers State and a sample size of 185 principals drawn with multistage sampling approach representing 75% of principals. The principals responded to a structured validated instrument titled Deregulation of Educational Services Questionnaire (DESQ) and Quality Assurance Questionnaire (QAQ) designed by the researchers and the reliability indexes using cronbach alpha method were 0.77 and 0.74 respectively. Simple regression was used to answer the research questions while t-test associated with simple regression was used to test the null hypotheses. Findings of the study showed that deregulation of facilities predicted 5.20% of quality assurance in public secondary schools and there was a significant contribution between deregulation of facilities and quality assurance while deregulation of supervision predicted 3.70% of quality assurance in public secondary schools and there was a significant contribution between deregulation of supervision and quality assurance in public secondary schools in Rivers State. It was concluded that deregulation of facilities and supervision predicted 5.20% and 3.70% of quality assurance in public secondary schools in Rivers State. The study therefore recommended that the government should deregulate the provision of facilities and supervision to enhance effective teaching and learning in secondary schools in Rivers State.