Accessibility and Geospatial Assessment of Public Secondary School Education in Osun West Senatorial District, Nigeria

Abstract

The study adopts Geographic Information System (GIS) application to analyse the accessibility and spatial configuration of public education at the Secondary Schools (SSs) level in the Osun West Senatorial District (OWSD), Nigeria, in order to provide information and materials to strengthen and promote secondary school education planning. The study also analyses the location of public secondary schools as well as the usage of the allocated space. The data for this study were obtained on the field by using the Global Positioning System (GPS) to determine and analyse the coverage area of OWSD’s 116 Public Secondary Schools (PSSs) based on population density. Settlements with public secondary schools (PSSs) were stratified into three different categories: suburb, with less than 10,000 people; semi-urban with 10,000–19,999 people; and urban with 20,000 people and above. Descriptive statistics and GIS were employed to analyse the acquired data. The research findings established that PSSs within 1km radius (Rs) buffer of the study area were clustered, with 81.8% in the urban were clustered while in the semi-urban and suburb settlement categories 20% and 70.0% respectively were dispersed. According to the findings, at a buffer of 2km Rs, 64.8% of the PSSs in urban settlements were clustered, while (21.4%) and the majority (71.4%) were dispersed in semi-urban and suburb settlements, respectively. In addition, results established that at the buffer of 3km, PSSs were clustered at 63.3% in the urban, 23.1% were dispersed in the semi-urban, and 69.2% in the suburb settlements. Moreover, at 4km buffer PSSs, it is apparent from the findings that the majority of the schools at 55.9% in the urban settlements were clustered, while most of the PSSs at 35.7% in the semi-urban settlements and 56.1% in the suburb settlements were dispersed. Conclusively, this research established a high rate of uneven accessibility to PSSs in OWSD. As a result, it is recommended that foreign and private investors, stakeholders, and government need to pool their resources in order to ensure adequate PSSs education availability to all settlement categories.