Juxtaposition of selected sections of the British Butler’s act and Nigeria's Universal Basic Education (UBE) Act: Implications for universal education in Nigeria

Abstract

Education laws are imperative for the activation or actualization of education policies and programmmes. Therefore, a critical  examination of education laws is necessary in order to establish why and how such laws directly or remotely impact educational systems.  This paper is a juxtaposition of the famous Butler’s Act of 1944 in Britain with the Universal Basic Education, Act 2004 in Nigeria. It is an  attempt to demonstrate how the spirit, letter or lacuna of a law can affect the enforcement or implementation of the law in particular,  and the educational system in general. The paper explores the amplitudes of the historic British Act, and identifies the tremendous gains  recorded in the British universal education, owing to the robust provisions of some Sections of the Act on aid to voluntary schools, the  role of parents and feefree school system, which is contrary to the questions of suitability, lacunae and ambiguities that touch on similar  Sections in the UBE Act. The paper notes that the lacunae and ambiguities identified in these Sections of the UBE Act manifested in their  apparent skewness and evident impracticability. The paper submits that Nigeria has a lot to learn from Butler’s Act, particularly from the  Sections that gave support to private schools, enabled active participation of parents and clarified the status of fee-free education. The  key findings of the paper therefore makes it a comparative analysis of how similar laws, though at separate points in history, have  informed the marked differences in the practices of universal education in Britain and Nigeria.