Many scholars have argued that learning environment are variables that can affect students’ academic achievement, including performance in examinations (Ajayi, 2001 and Oluchukwu, 2000).
Being an educational institution, that is tasked to deliver quality and accessible education for all, the facilities available in a school, help a lot in improving the learning environment of each individual learners.
Big schools can afford to offer complete facilities like a gym/PE room, a library, a school canteen, an ICT center, guidance and counselling room, a playground and even a waiting area for parents or guardians fetching their kids from school.
Such facilities help the pupils/students to learn more aside from what they learn from the classroom.
The PE room enhances the body-kinesthetic abilities of a child. He/she can have an area to learn dance steps, physical exercises, rhythmic patterns of the body and the like.
The library is place where a child can have both intensive and extensive reading time. Books available in the library can help the child for supplementary learning materials.
The school canteen helps the child practice his/her practical math skills and the discipline to buy while waiting for his/her turn.
Other facilities may also have more than one way to be of help to every learner.
However, if a school is just small with limited MOOE funds for such facilities, does that make it less of a performing school?
Schools, small as they may be like ours, can also provide quality education despite the unavailability of some of the facilities available to big schools.
For one, if there is no PE room, the school ground becomes the gym – though we have to make sure that we avoid exposing pupils to the sun more than the necessary time. Activities needing gym area can be undertaken during late afternoons or early morning – provided there is a permission for the schedules which may be overridden.
A canteen can be provided even with just a mere table where all the goods and stuff can be displayed and purchased.
An ICT room may not be that indispensable for as long as you have a table where you can put a desktop or a laptop on and you can create a schedule when and where pupils can take turns in using the laptop of the desktop which can be placed right anywhere in the teacher’s classroom.
Buildings and facilities are essential, for sure because they supplement teaching and learning in many different ways.
However, in the absence of the physical building and facilities, teaching and learning life still goes on. It would only take some form of creativity and a dozen of persistence on the part of the teacher to make sure that he/she can innovate and still deliver the same results – quality education that accessible to all.