Fallen giants

Although the government denies it, the hurried introduction of free primary education by the National Rainbow Coalition [NARC] two years ago has compromised quality standards in public schools. Touted as the greatest achievement of the NARC administration, the policy has seen previously award winning public primary schools being outshone by private ones patronized by the rich, in a country where 56 per cent of the population live below the poverty line.

Nothing illustrates the grim scenario better than the recently released results of last year’s Kenya Certificate of Primary Education [KCPE] – the qualifying exam for joining secondary schools. Out of the top 100 candidates nationally, only one came from a public primary school while the rest were from private schools. While releasing the results late last year, Education Minister Prof George Saitoti denied that free primary education had compromised quality but could not explain why former academic giants from the public sector could not shine any more. He instead blamed the poor performance on some exam questions which he claimed were beyond the primary school pupils’ level of knowledge.

Amid the falling standards, parents as well as education experts are now worried that education will soon remain a preserve of the rich, whose children go to private schools with highly qualified teachers and all the requisite facilities. Students from these schools are also the ones who secure positions in the best secondary schools in the country and eventually make it to the university, leaving their counterparts from the public schools with no option but to drop out. Education Assistant Minister Dr Kilemi Mwiria has acknowledged that this year, 60 per cent of the places in national secondary schools – the best in the country - have been taken by pupils from rich private schools, who accounted for only 10 per cent of the total KCPE candidates.

In its 2002 study titled The business of education: A look at Kenya’s private education sector, the International Finance Corporation [IFC] – the private sector lending arm of the World Bank – says that in the 2001 secondary school intake, public primary schools in Nairobi sent only 16 pupils or 11.5 per cent to national schools while private schools sent 123 or 88.5 per cent “

Following the development, alarm bells have bee sounded. “The government should urgently address the issue be cause with the current trend, good quality education will remain a preserve of the rich”, observes Mrs Jenipher Otieno, a parent at Nairobi’s Riruta Satellite Primary School. “Let us not burry our heads. Let us admit as Kenyans that we have a problem of accessibility. The children of the rich will continue to have access to quality education because the private schools that they attend employ graduate teachers while their counterparts in public schools are taught by both trained and untrained teachers”, notes Dr Davy Koech, a former chairman of one of the commissions of education enquiries, whose reports were left to gather dust on the shelves.

The government’s denial notwithstanding, the negative impact of the introduction of free education is there for all to see. For the past two years, Nairobi’s Olympic primary school – a perennial leader in national examinations - has been out of the limelight, thanks to falling standards. Mrs Ruth Namulundu, the school’s headmistress attributes its poor performance to a host of problems bedevilling the institution. “Currently we have about 80 pupils in each class as opposed to 40 previously. The pupil-teacher ratio here is the highest - 80:1. And the school has a shortage of 20 teachers”, she lamented.

The situation at Olympic is replicated in many other public primary schools countywide and confirms the unpleasant reality that while Kenya struggles to achieve Education For All [EFA] goals, the quality of learning remains wanting for children attending publicly funded schools. Mr Joseph Okumu, the headmaster of Hawinga primary school in western Kenya, cites overstretched facilities as the cause of poor performance in public schools. “The numbers just cannot cope with the existing facilities. If this situation is allowed to continue, public schools will be no more”, he lamented.

The NARC government won the December 2002 transition elections on a number of reform platforms, including the introduction of free primary schooling. While the enrolment in the country’s 18000 primary schools has increased, with about 2 million more children joining school, it has not been matched with quality. Faced with overflowing classes, teacher shortages and inadequate facilities, many schools are unable to comprehensively implement the curriculum.

Admittedly, No additional classrooms have been built to cater for increased numbers. There is also a major shortage of desks and in some urban areas, children take lessons seated on the floor, while in some rural areas, pupils learn under trees. Joseph Karuga, the headmaster of Nairobi Primary School, which produced the only top candidate from a public school, echoes Okumu’s sentiments. “The increase in the number of pupils has affected many public schools that lack the resources to match the changes”, he observes. “The only way out is a complete overhaul of the entire education system”, says Dr Okwach Abagi, an education policy researcher and analyst.

During his recent visit to Kenya, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown had a chance to gauge the system, when he toured Olympic Primary School. While praising the Kenya government for introducing free primary education, he however noted that the challenges to the success of the system remained real, namely the strengthening of the existing infrastructure by building additional schools and training more teachers.

Though it was initially estimated that the free primary education would require only KES 4b [$51m] to implement, last year the government disbursed KES12b [$155m]. Each pupil is allocated a paltry KES 1020 [$13.2] annually for books and other requirements. The situation has been compounded by the government’s inability to employ teachers following a freeze on teacher employment in 1997. While the Kenya National Union of Teachers [KNUT], through its secretary general Francis Nganga, maintains that there is a shortage of 60000 teachers countrywide, the government denies it.

But what cannot be gainsaid is that since 2001, the government has only replaced 7500 teachers who leave the service through natural attrition annually. “We do recognize teacher shortages but I doubt whether they affect the whole country. What is needed is to remove teachers from overstaffed schools to those that are understaffed”, argues Dr Mwiria.

Besides falling academic standards in public primary schools, poor transition from primary to secondary school remains a major concern in Kenya, like in other sub-Saharan African countries. The country has only 3700 secondary schools with more than 700000 students. With the primary enrolment expected to continue growing following the introduction of free education, more and more pupils are likely to miss secondary school places, dealing further blow to an education system that has been accused of not caring for pupils beyond the primary level. Out of the 650000 candidates who sat the KCPE examination last year, only 300000 secured secondary school places.

With no other training opportunities available, the remaining 350000, having no skills to participate in any meaningful development, will be forced to join the growing ranks of the unemployed. Experts now argue that it is such a waste to have pupils in school for only eight years then dump them. “For a long time, we have concentrated on access to primary education without looking at the transition to secondary school and the university. It is very sad for us to waste 350000 children. These are not miracle babies. We have lived with them all along. But lack of forward planning has actually been our sin. Why didn’t we plan for them? Poses Dr Koech. “The government has left middle level colleges and village polytechnics to die”, adds Dr Abagi.

Still, the number of public secondary schools is unlikely to increase due to government policy requiring communities to expand and fully utilize existing institutions, despite increased demand for secondary education. However, Dr Mwiria says that the government in its Sessional Paper of 2004 demonstrates its commitment to the development of education and training, through sustained allocation of resources, whose purpose is to address the challenges of access, equity, teacher quality and utilization.

The education situation in Kenya bears testimony to the findings of UNESCO’s Education For All Global Monitoring Report: The quality Imperative 2005. According to the report, 35 countries, 22 of them in sub-Saharan Africa, are very far from achieving the six Education for All [EFA] goals, five years after the Dakar Forum. That being the case, Kenya is not the only country dogged by impediments to the attainment of EFA goals. In Nigeria, experts argue that the Universal Basic Education [UBE] programme, introduced in 1999 to provide compulsory and quality education at primary school and junior secondary school levels, may collapse due to inadequate funding, lack of enough qualified teachers and poor infrastructure.

The Nigerian case mirrors a similar scenario in Malawi, where a combination of poor infrastructure, lack of trained teachers and the HIV/AIDS pandemic is hampering the country’s quest to achieve quality education, while in Zambia, the government’s failure to employ 9000 trained teachers has led to falling standards in primary schools.

With all these odds, the achievement of quality education remains a pipe dream in sub-Saharan Africa.