The study investigated the impact of socio-economic status of parent and government free education programme on student’s academic achievement in public secondary schools in south-west Nigeria. The study adopted the descriptive survey and Ex-post facto research design. The targeted sample for this study was 300 respondents. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select the sample for the study. In all, 288 Students, and 12 Principals were carefully selected to make a total of 300 respondents out of the population. Two sets of instruments were used to collect data for this study; the instruments which were self-designed and self-administered on the respondents by the researcher with a reliability coefficient of 0.879 and 0.78 for (FSSFEAQ) and SAP respectively. The general questions raised were answered using descriptive statistics involving frequency counts, percentages, mean deviation and chart while the postulated hypotheses were tested using inferential statistics involving Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Chi-Square test at 0.05 level of significance. The study revealed that there was no significant difference between the levels of sponsorship available to public school students in south west states. The study all revealed that there was a significant difference between socio-economic status among the south-west states. It was revealed that there was no significant association between socio-economic status and student’s academic achievement in public secondary school in south west. Based on the findings, it was recommended that Government should increase budgetary allocation for education to improve sponsorship of public secondary schools education and also encourage individual Philanthropist and Non-government organization to render more support to education in order to boost the students’ academic achievement.
Keywords: Academic Achievement, Free Education, Socio-Economic Status, family
