Nigeria education policy: What's really happening in Nigerian schools

When you hear Nigeria education policy, the set of rules, funding rules, and administrative decisions that shape how schools run across Nigeria. Also known as Nigerian education system, it’s not just about textbooks and classrooms—it’s about who gets paid, who gets locked out, and who gets left behind. This isn’t theory. It’s daily life for over 20 million students and hundreds of thousands of teachers caught in a system that’s stretched thin, underfunded, and politically tangled.

At the heart of the chaos is ASUU, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, the powerful group of lecturers who keep hitting the streets when pay and conditions don’t improve. Their two-week strike in October 2025 shut down exams for half a million students. The government said demands were met—but then enforced a "no work, no pay" rule. That’s not resolution. That’s punishment. Meanwhile, KNEC, the Kenya National Examinations Council, but often confused with Nigeria’s own exam bodies like NABTEB and NECO, keeps making headlines for its own registration deadlines and re-sit fees, showing how broken exam systems are across West Africa. In Nigeria, the CAC, Corporate Affairs Commission, the agency that registers businesses and is now also handling education-linked SME grants, and SMEDAN, the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency, which runs free training and funding drives for youth entrepreneurs are trying to plug gaps the schools can’t fill. But when schools don’t have electricity, let alone qualified teachers, how much can a free business registration really help?

The real story isn’t in the press releases. It’s in the students who missed exams because lecturers walked out. It’s in the parents paying extra for private tutoring because public schools shut down. It’s in the young people who skip school to join the informal economy because they see no future in a system that’s been broken for decades. Nigeria’s education policy isn’t failing because of bad intentions. It’s failing because it’s been ignored for too long, patched with political gestures, and starved of real investment. What you’ll find below isn’t just news—it’s the raw, unfiltered truth from the front lines of Nigeria’s education crisis: strikes, registrations, funding battles, and the quiet desperation of a generation waiting for someone to finally act.