ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF FINANCING SECONDARY EDUCATION IN ENUGU STATE
Keywords:
alternative sources, financing, secondary education, public secondary schools, principals, teachers, community involvement, PTA funds, policies, education commission, school principalsAbstract
The 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.
