Abstract

This article, titled “Challenges of Out-of-School Children: The Role of School Heads”, examines the antecedence of out-of-school children in the phase of national and international perspectives. It examines the concept of school children; and concept of outof-school children. The paper also identified the challenges associated with out-of-school children in Nigeria as: poverty; security threat; inadequate funding of education; inadequate infrastructures; poor quality of teaching; socio-cultural/religious factor; poor implementation of school feeding programme; lack of employment opportunities; and corruption. Thus, the role of school heads in tackling the issue of out-of-school children in Nigeria are also identified, which include: provision and allocation of adequate resources; effective supervision of instruction; capacity building for teachers; provision of effective counselling unit; improving school environment; promotion of school-community relations; proper implementation of school feeding programme; provision of School Security initiatives; and monitoring and evaluation. The article comes up with the following recommendations, among which are: government at all levels should make adequate provision of adequate teaching and learning materials to improve quality of teaching and learning especially, on skills development (life skills and employability skills) to enable retention and transition of learners in the school; there should be proper use of school-community relations policy and of public-private partnerships (PPPs) to assist children especially those from poor/disadvantaged family background to sponsor their schooling to realize their potentials as well; and government and private individuals should joint hands provide more skills acquisition centres to engage the out-of-school children and equip them with various training they may need to become selves-employed and productive in the society.

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