What would you say you have achieved since you took the reins at the FCE (Technical)?
My appointment started from 26th of May, 2019, though I resumed on the 27 (that 26th fell on a Sunday, so I resumed the following day, Monday 27th). Since I resumed, I’ve always made sure that I keep to the mission and vision that I submitted to the governing council that appointed me. The previous administrators tried their best, but I noticed that there is a missing link. The college was established to fill the gap in technical and vocational needs of the country. If you look at our educational system, this is seriously lacking. I noticed that many of our children want to go to university to acquire degrees. It’s good to be a degree holder, but what do you do with that degree after graduation? To me, it’s important to key into the objectives of the founding fathers who established this college, and ensure that the college under my leadership fills that vocational and technical needs gap. At the end of the day, when our students graduate, they will not only have the opportunity to teach, but they will be skillfully engaged anywhere they are employed or they can also decide to start on their own.
Have you been able to achieve this goal?
Yes, to a great extent. Since I came on board, we have been able to strengthen the academic programmes of the college. We have also ensured that most of our departments are better equipped while lecturers and instructors are also given adequate support in terms of teaching and learning facilities/materials. We have also focused on developing infrastructures in the college, because there is little or nothing the lecturers can do without adequate infrastructures in place. I ensure that infrastructures are evenly shared in the college.
We have five schools currently in the college: School of Education, which is in charge of general education (pedagogy,etc); School of Business Education which also runs the Accounting Education, Office Technology and Management Education; (it used to be called Secretarial Education). In the National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) curriculum, each college was given the opportunity to expand its departments to four, hence, the Marketing Education Department and Entrepreneurship Department was created. As a result of this, we now have four departments/programmes in the School of Business Education namely, Accounting Education, Office Technology and Management Education, Marketing Education and Entrepreneurship Education, before the establishment of the Entrepreneurship Education Department as included in the NCCE minimum standards in 2020, which was less than a year after I was appointed.
