COVID-19 and private schools' management strategies during lockdown in Nigeria

Abstract

During COVID-19 lockdown, teachers, education professionals and stakeholders (the management of private schools) were asked to supply students with teaching materials and teach students directly via remote digital tools. While public schools were catered for by the government, private schools were left in the midst of the myriad of the pandemic to decide their fate. It is against this backdrop that this study investigated private school management strategies during the COVID19 lockdown. The study adopted the descriptive type of research design. Proprietors of private schools formed the population of the study. Two hundred respondents were randomly selected to form the sample for the study. Online questionnaire was used as instrument for the study. Face and content validity of the instruments were established by experts in the field of test and measurements while reliability test was carried out via pilot study where cronbach alpha of .93 was obtained. The findings of the study showed that a majority of the respondents agreed to use social media tools such as WhatsApp, Telegram for dissemination of knowledge as well as communication with teachers. The findings further revealed that the class attendance was taken to maintain the class population during the teaching learning process. However, it was discovered that a majority of the respondents agreed that they did not maintain relationship with school community during the lockdown, while no income was generated as all lessons were done free of charge. It was thus recommended that the private school management should organise workshops and seminars on online teaching tools (e.g. zoom, Google meet, webex) for their teachers and need to provide alternative financial means for them to cater for the future lockdown as a result the pandemic among others. Keywords: Covid-19, Management Strategies, Private Schools, Nigeria