ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF FINANCING SECONDARY EDUCATION IN ENUGU STATE

Abstract

This study investigated the alternative sources of financing secondary education in Enugu State. The researcher adopted a descriptive survey research design for the study. The study was guided by two research questions and two hypotheses. The hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study was conducted among the public secondary schools in Enugu State. The population for the study consisted of all the 314 principals and the 8598 teachers in the six Education Zones of Enugu State. However, the researcher purposively sampled two education zones namely; Enugu and Udi for the study. Enugu Education Zone has 31 secondary schools while Udi Education Zone has 54 secondary schools making the total of 85 secondary schools. Thus; the sample size for the study was 85 principals and 978 teachers. The population for principals is manageable while the researcher applied the rule of thumb in getting the sample size for teachers. Hence, 10% of the population for teachers was used to get 98 as the sample size. The instrument for data collection was a researchers’ developed questionnaire titled “Alternative Sources of Financing Secondary Education Questionnaire (ASFSEQ)” which was faced-validated by three research experts from Faculty of Education, Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT). The instrument consisted of 14 items assigned to the two research questions. To determine the reliability of the instrument, Cronbach Alpha was used in which 0.78 was determined for Cluster 1 and 0.79 for Cluster 2 with an overall reliability index of 0.79 which made the instrument reliable. Mean and standard deviation were used for analysing the data. It was found out that community involvement and PTA funds are alternative sources of financing secondary education in Enugu State. Based on the findings, the researcher recommended that, education commission should relax some of their policies to enable communities involve effectively in financing secondary education in the state as well as the school principals should be mandated to utilize the PTA’s funds very well.