IMPACT OF SUPERVISORY ROLE PERFORMANCE OF THE COMMANDANTS ON MANAGEMENT OF PRISON SCHOOLS IN NIGERIA

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.1: Background to the study

The supervisory role performances of the commandants in school setting are very imperative to the effective management of the prison schools. The concepts of supervision and management border on the perception of the leader about his roles in achieving the stated goals of the entire system. If any commandant performs a good supervisory role in the school system, he will achieve a positive result and thereby fulfill the goals of the institution. Management is a social process designed to ensure the co-operation, participation and intervention of others which deals directly with the process of planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing and controlling and the utilization of human and material resources in a particular system for the achievement of predetermined objectives (UNESCO, 1979 and Ogunnu, 2001).

The idea of monitoring and reviewing the teaching and learning process makes management and supervision of institution very imperative in our educational institutions in order for these institutions to live up to expectation and to realize the objectives set before them. Though the roles of the commandants as instructional leader were widely advocated, they seldom practiced and that commandants spent most of their time dealing with managerial issues. The commandants‟ role is primarily that of a manager. Stronge (1998) calculated that school commandants spent 62.2% of their time on managerial issues and 11% on instructional leadership issues even after undergoing training or in-service for the role of instructional leader.

In a system, supervision implies the process of ensuring that policies, principles, rules, regulations and methods prescribed the use of expert knowledge and experience to oversee, evaluate and coordinate the process of improving teaching and learning in schools (Igwe 2001, Krochhar 2005 and Igbo 2002). Supervision is the instructional leadership that relates perspectives to behaviours, clarifies purposes, contributes to and support organizational actions, coordinates interactions, provides for maintenance and improvement of the instructional programmes and

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assesses goals achievements. It is also the general leadership role and a coordinating role among all school activities concerned with learning (Kerry and Burke, 1989). Nwaogu (1980) viewed supervision as the process of helping, giving, advising and stimulating growth in a subordinate in order to improve on the quality of his work.

IMPACT OF SUPERVISORY ROLE PERFORMANCE OF THE COMMANDANTS ON MANAGEMENT OF PRISON SCHOOLS IN NIGERIA