Time, cost and construction of public primary school classrooms in southwestern, Nigeria (2020 - 2024)

Abstract

This paper employed a planning strategy to determine the time and cost of constructing classrooms in South-western public primary schools in Nigeria from the year 2020 to 2024. The paper embraced the mixed-method research design by employing the qualitative and quantitative approaches to gain an in-depth understanding of the variables investigated. The study population comprised 8401 public primary schools in the six Southwestern states of Nigeria. The study sample comprised 1092 schools, 15 architects and quantity surveyors using the Research Advisor. The purposive sampling technique was used to select three out of the six Southwestern states. In each state, the simple random sampling technique was employed in selecting the schools and their head teachers, architects and quantity surveyors to respond to the questionnaire. An official document containing the primary data on pupils' flow collected from the offices of Universal Basic Education Boards of the selected state was used to generate baseline enrolment figure and to  corroborate the data that was provided by the schools under investigation. In particular, Primary School Pupils’ Flow Questionnaire (PSPF-Q) was administered on primary school head teachers, Cost Schedule Form Questionnaire (CSF-Q) on quantity surveyors and Time Schedule Form Questionnaire (TSF-Q) on architects. The results showed that N5,819,298,322.76 is the mean cost of constructing the required number of classrooms per state in Southwestern Nigeria in the year 2020, N7,820,342,573.22 in the year 2021, N10,363,911,641.54 in the year 2022, N13,585,830,755.00 in the year 2023 and N17,639,959,050.00 in the year 2024. Also, a maximum of 22 days, 15 hours is needed for the construction of one classroom based on the assumption that one worker will be allocated to each task per time. The study concluded that the government should be able to plan for the construction of the needed number of  classrooms based on the time and cost estimate in this work.

Keywords: Time, Cost, Construction, educational planning, public primary school