Dr. Aliyu Tilde, Bauchi Education Commissioner said from January 2020, all public schools in Bauchi state will use biometric attendance register for fingerprint that will help in checking teachers’ punctuality and attendance.
According to the Commissioner, knowing the relevance of contact, the first thing he did was to measure it as it affects teachers, adding that, “I called for the daily attendance in the teachers’ registers immediately I assumed office last September.”
“I had the fingerprint idea in my Blueprint, but I thought it would take some time and a fortune to acquire. “So I started with the idea of receiving WhatsApp messages of attendance register pages sent to the Ministry, collated and analysed by ICT officials and getting the reports two hours later, daily,” he said.
Tilde said upon realization that, “the fingerprint tool is cheap and affordable which can be bought for each school, I challenged them to write a program that will pool the data from every school and collate it in one spreadsheet or analyse it for different outcomes, they told it was possible and they did it.”
Dr Tilde who explained that the fingerprint terminal was chosen as clocking device because of its benefits added that, “I realised that hardly can we find a tool that will give us so much in education as it promises, apart from the computer. Both the Ministry and the teachers will not like to part with it, once they embrace it.”
To live by example, the commissioner revealed that “I started deploying it at the Ministry, exactly two months ago. “Just thumbprint in the morning as you come in and thumbprint in the afternoon as you check out and, behold, The system sends your information instantly to a secured database that is accessible to anyone that is officially allowed to access it, including yourself.”
The commissioner said that his office calls for a monthly summary of the attendance record by clicking on his computer and ask for reasons why someone is habitually late or absent for appropriate action depending on the reasons offered.
For those who are punctual, the commissioner said, “it goes into their records and they stand to be rewarded for it. A chance may come for a conference, a promotion, an appointment, a prize, etc, and he or she will be among the first to be considered and will get it except if barred by other performance indicators.”
To ensure that staff attendance are adequately monitored, the education commissioner said, various strategies were deployed to pull those lagging behind from the ministry down to classrooms to be on the same page of service delivery to the people of Bauchi State that the workers are being paid to serve.
“Some teachers need more priming than others, while many are just fantastic and wonderfully conscientious, firing their engines to the best of their abilities even in the absence of a vigilant system. “The exercise was not a witch hunt as it is clear now since nobody found wanting was punished. “It was a research for a data that will be used in planning for the future,” he explained.
