AVAILABILITY AND COMPLIANCE WITH SAFETY LEGISLATIONS FOR SERVICE DELIVERY IN PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN DELTA STATE

The paper investigated the availability and compliance with safety legislations for service delivery in public secondary schools in Delta State. Three research questions and three corresponding hypotheses were answered and tested in the study. The design adopted for the study was descriptive survey while the population of the study was all the 466 public senior secondary school principals in Delta State out of which 444 principals were sampled for the study using purposive sampling technique based on the number of teachers available as at the time of the study consisting of 238 male and 206 female principals. A 23 item questionnaire titled “Availability and Compliance with Safety Legislations for Service Delivery Questionnaire (ACSLSDQ) was used for data collection and the questionnaire was face and content validated by two Measurement and Evaluation experts in University of Port Harcourt. Reliability of the instrument was 0.80 using Cronbach alpha statistics. Data collected were analyzed using mean, standard deviation and rank order statistics while z-test statistics was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Result of the study indicated that safety equipment such as fire extinguishers, panic alarm, first aid box etc. were not available in the schools. Similarly, it was revealed that despite the fact that a few safety regulations existed in the schools, there was a low level of compliance to these regulations. Safety training was recommended for the school principals for effective service delivery in their various schools.