The eight boards and agencies

The Ministry sets policy, prepares the budget, approves and inspects schools, runs the State examinations and takes the census. It does not manage schools. Management sits with eight parastatal boards and agencies, each established by its own instrument, each with an executive head, a budget line and a defined estate.

That gives nine bodies in all — eight boards plus the Ministry — which is where the shorthand comes from. The arrangement exists because the estates are genuinely different: a basic school needs capitation, textbooks and a teacher establishment, a technical college needs workshops and consumables, a Tsangaya school needs a Mallam's stipend and an integration curriculum, and a library needs stock and cataloguing. Under one management the largest estate would absorb the attention and the money of all the rest.

For a parent, a head teacher or a proprietor the practical consequence is short: find the board that manages your school and you have found the office that funds it, posts its teachers, inspects it and answers for it.

A school belongs to exactly one board, and its school code says which. Codes run KN / LGA / CATEGORY / NNNN, so KN/MUN/SSS/0143 is a public senior secondary school in Kano Municipal, managed by KSSMB, and KN/GWA/TSG/0271 is a Tsangaya school in Gwale, managed by KSQISMB. There is no school with two boards and no school with none.

A school changes board only by a decision of the Ministry, and only when its category changes — a junior secondary school upgraded to a full secondary school moves from SUBEB to KSSMB; a non-integrated Islamiyyah school that completes integration moves within KSQISMB from one category to another. The change is recorded in the register and the school code is reissued.

The board that manages a school is shown against every entry in the school register, so if you are not sure, search the register first.