Ogun State Bans School Graduation and End-of-Session Parties: The Full Story Behind Two Circulars in Two Days

Two Circulars, Two Days, One Clear Message

The Ogun State Government issued one of the most widely discussed education policy directives in Nigeria this week — and then, within 24 hours, issued a second one to clarify and refine it. Understanding both is essential to understanding what is actually being banned, what is still permitted, and what the state government is genuinely trying to accomplish.

The first circular, dated June 17, 2026 and signed by the Director of Education for Private Schools, A.A. Bisiriyu, on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology's Permanent Secretary, was addressed to all administrators of both public and non-state private schools across Ogun State. It directed immediate compliance with a ban on graduation ceremonies and end-of-session parties across all classes. The language was sweeping: the state government frowns at organising graduation or end-of-session party ceremonies in all classes in both public and non-state private schools. No school owner should organise such gatherings forthwith. Institutions that violated the directive would face sanctions.

The second circular, issued on June 18, 2026 and referenced PRVS 426/5, reached the same administrators through their Zonal Education Officers and modified the June 17 position in an important way. Graduation ceremonies are now prohibited specifically for pupils in Nursery, Kindergarten, and other non-terminal classes. Ceremonies are permitted only for students completing key stages of formal education — specifically, Primary Six, Junior Secondary School 3, and Senior Secondary School 3.

Read together, the two circulars define a position that is at once more practical than the blanket ban implied and more principled than a simple accommodation of school owner preferences: mark genuine academic milestones, not every year of attendance, and do so without imposing financial burdens on families.

Why the Government Acted: Extortion Dressed as Celebration

The ministry's stated rationale for the ban is direct and, in the economic context of 2026, hard to argue with. Reports had reached the ministry that school administrators — in both the public and private sectors — were compelling parents and guardians to pay various fees under the guise of organising graduation and end-of-year celebrations. These were not voluntary contributions to a shared community event. They were mandatory charges, collected under social pressure, for events that a family with stretched finances could not easily decline to participate in without their child being visibly excluded.

The practice, the government stated, directly violates binding resolutions reached during the 2025/2026 pre-resumption stakeholders' meeting held in September 2025 at Lisabi Grammar School Hall in Idi-Aba, Abeokuta. That meeting was a formal engagement between the state government, school administrators, parent groups, and education stakeholders — and one of its agreed outcomes was precisely that schools would not impose these financial burdens on parents. The June 2026 circulars are not new policy emerging from nowhere. They are the enforcement response to schools that agreed to something in September 2025 and then quietly ignored their agreement as the school year drew to a close.

The Governor Dapo Abiodun administration's framing of the issue is explicit. The governor frowns upon forcing parents to fund luxurious celebrations during challenging economic times. In an economy where the removal of the fuel subsidy and continued inflationary pressure have significantly tightened household budgets across Nigeria, the compulsory purchase of graduation costumes, party attire, event venue contributions, and the other incidental costs that these ceremonies impose on families is a meaningful financial burden — not a trivial social inconvenience.

The ministry's circular directed school administrators not only to comply but to publicise the directive widely among parents, teachers, and other stakeholders. The government also opened a reporting channel: parents and guardians who encounter schools demanding money for graduation or end-of-session events were directed to report such demands to the nearest Zonal Education Office or to the Ministry itself.

What Is Now Permitted and What Is Prohibited

The combined effect of the two circulars creates a framework that can be summarised clearly.

Permitted: graduation ceremonies for students completing Primary Six, Junior Secondary School 3, and Senior Secondary School 3. These are the terminal classes of each level of formal education in Nigeria's 6-3-3-4 system — the moments at which a child genuinely concludes one phase of their educational journey and either moves to the next or exits formal schooling. A valedictory event recognising a Primary Six student's completion of primary education, or a ceremony marking an SSS3 student's departure from secondary school, remains possible under the state government's policy as refined in the June 18 circular.

Prohibited: graduation ceremonies for Nursery, Kindergarten, JSS1, JSS2, SS1, SS2, and all other non-terminal classes. A child moving from Kindergarten to Primary One has not completed a formal educational stage. A student progressing from JSS2 to JSS3 has not crossed a milestone that warrants a ceremony. These are the ceremonies — often elaborate, often expensive, often accompanied by mandatory fees for costumes, photography, food contributions, and venue decorations — that the government has specifically targeted.

Also prohibited: end-of-session parties across all classes regardless of terminal status. The distinction between a graduation ceremony — which can be appropriate in limited circumstances — and an end-of-session party — which the government is prohibiting across the board — is the distinction between marking academic accomplishment and organising a social event at parental expense.

The Financial Reality Behind the Policy

Ogun State's decision does not exist in a policy vacuum. It reflects a specific and growing tension in Nigerian education between the legitimate desire of schools to mark student progress and celebrate community, and the reality that the costs of these events are almost invariably transferred to parents who are already stretched.

The economics of a typical Nigerian private school graduation ceremony are not modest. Parents may be required to purchase or hire a graduation gown and cap. They may be required to contribute to a venue cost, catering, or entertainment. Photography packages are frequently mandatory rather than optional, with prints sold back to families at prices that exceed what the market would charge independently. Invitation cards are sold. Graduation programmes are sold. Gifts for teachers are organised collectively with each family contributing a set amount. A family with a child graduating from a private school Nursery level — a child who is perhaps three or four years old — may spend as much as thirty to fifty thousand naira or more on a ceremony that is, in any meaningful sense, entirely optional and whose primary beneficiary is the school's reputation and revenue rather than the child's development.

Multiply this across multiple children in a household, or across a year in which a family's income has declined in real terms due to inflation, and the cumulative financial burden of school celebrations becomes genuinely consequential for household budgets. The government has made a policy judgment that this burden is not one that schools should be permitted to impose, and the response from many parents has been explicit relief.

The Counter-Argument: Schools, Motivation, and Community

Not everyone has welcomed the directive with uniform enthusiasm, and the counter-arguments deserve to be stated fairly.

School owners, particularly in the private school sector, have historically relied on graduation ceremonies and end-of-year events as significant marketing and positioning moments. A well-organised graduation ceremony signals institutional quality, creates positive experiences for families that lead to referrals, and generates goodwill in the school community. The prohibition of these events — even where they are not being used extractively — removes a tool that school administrators argue serves educational and community purposes beyond the financial.

Some education stakeholders have also argued that age-appropriate celebration of academic progress, even at the Nursery level, can serve genuine motivational purposes for children, can strengthen the school-family relationship, and can mark transitions in ways that help children process the emotional experience of ending one year and beginning another. The argument is that the problem is not the celebration itself but the compulsory commercialisation of it — and that a policy allowing schools to organise voluntary, low-cost or free events would achieve the same parental protection without the blanket prohibition.

The Ogun State Government's position, as stated in the circulars and affirmed by the Gbetu TV reporting, is that any such activities must remain modest and non-commercial — language that implies the absolute prohibition in the circulars may have some flexibility in practice for genuinely voluntary, genuinely low-cost events. But the circulars as written do not make that distinction explicit, and the warning that schools violating the directive face immediate, severe regulatory sanctions, including possible suspension of operating licences, suggests that the enforcement posture is not lenient.

The Compliance Framework: Reporting and Sanctions

The enforcement mechanism that accompanies the ban is significant because bans without enforcement are announcements, not policies. The Ogun State Ministry of Education has established a reporting channel through which parents can alert Zonal Education Officers or the ministry directly when a school demands payment for a prohibited event. The circular directed school administrators to publicise the directive to parents — which creates a situation in which parents who have been informed of the ban are in a position to report violations that they observe.

The sanction threat is not vague. Schools found violating the directive face sanctions in accordance with applicable regulations — and for private schools specifically, the most consequential possible sanction is suspension of operating licence. A private school operator who disregards a ministry circular and then loses their operating licence over a graduation party has made a very expensive judgement call. The severity of the potential consequence is clearly calibrated to ensure that the financial incentive to comply significantly outweighs the financial incentive to ignore the directive.

The Broader Context: Ogun's Education Policy Direction

This directive fits within a broader pattern of Ogun State's education policy under Governor Dapo Abiodun's administration, which has consistently tried to position affordability and accessibility as core principles of the state's approach to pre-tertiary education.

The fact that the ban was not an entirely new policy but rather an enforcement of agreements reached at the September 2025 stakeholders' meeting is particularly telling. The ministry had given the education community an academic year to voluntarily comply with the spirit of those agreements. As the 2025/2026 session draws toward its expected mid-July conclusion, the evidence before the ministry was that compliance was not happening voluntarily — that schools were proceeding with exactly the revenue-extracting celebration model that the stakeholders' meeting had agreed to discontinue. The June circulars are the consequence of that non-compliance.

The directive comes as primary and secondary schools across Ogun State and other parts of Nigeria are in the final stretch of the current academic session. For schools that have already collected fees for graduation ceremonies or end-of-session parties, the question of what happens to those funds now sits awkwardly in the space between the directive and whatever commitments schools made to parents when they collected the money. The ministry's circulars do not specifically address refund obligations, but the logic of the ban — that parents should not be compelled to pay for these events — would seem to require that fees already collected be returned to families where the event will now not proceed.

For the parents of Ogun State's hundreds of thousands of school-going children, the directive offers something straightforward and economically meaningful: one less mandatory expense to absorb in the final weeks of a school year. In the Nigeria of 2026, that is not a trivial thing.

Sources

1. Premium Times — "Ogun bans graduation, end-of-session parties across public, private schools" (June 18, 2026)
   https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/888629-ogun-bans-graduation-end-of-session-parties-across-public-private-schools.html
2. Punch Newspapers — "Ogun bans graduation ceremonies, parties in public, private schools" (June 18, 2026)
   https://punchng.com/ogun-bans-graduation-ceremonies-parties-in-public-private-schools/
3. Punch Newspapers — "Only Primary Six, JSS3, SSS3 allowed graduations — Ogun warns schools" (June 19, 2026)
   https://punchng.com/only-primary-six-jss3-sss3-allowed-graduations-ogun-warns-schools/
4. Legit.ng — "Nigerian Governor bans graduation and year party as details emerge" (June 19, 2026)
   https://www.legit.ng/nigeria/1715285-nigerian-governor-bans-graduation-year-party-details-emerge/
5. Edugist — "Ogun State bans graduation and end-of-session parties" (June 18, 2026)
   https://edugist.org/ogun-state-bans-graduation-and-end-of-session-parties/
6. Gbetu TV — "Ogun State Government Reaffirms Ban on Graduation and End-of-Session Parties in All Schools" (June 18, 2026)
   https://www.gbetutv.com/ogun-state-government-reaffirms-ban-on-graduation-and-end-of-session-parties-in-all-schools/
7. AllAfrica / Premium Times — "Nigeria: Ogun Bans Graduation, End-of-Session Parties Across Public, Private Schools" (June 19, 2026)
   https://allafrica.com/stories/202606190008.html
8. Inside Ojodu — "Ogun bans graduation, end-of-session parties across public, private schools" (June 19, 2026)
   https://www.insideojodu.com/ogun-bans-graduation-end-of-session-parties-across-public-private-schools/
9. Nigerian Eye — "Ogun Bans Graduation Ceremonies for Nursery, Kindergarten, Non-Terminal Classes" (June 19, 2026)
   https://www.nigerianeye.com/2026/06/ogun-bans-graduation-ceremonies-for.html
10. Megastar Magazine — "Classes Allowed for Graduation Ceremonies in Ogun: Pry 6, JSS 3 and SSS 3" (June 19, 2026)
    https://www.megastarmagazine.com/education/classes-allowed-for-graduation-ceremonies-in-ogun-pry-6-jss-3-and-sss-3/