Economy

Free learning complicates plot for public schools

fpe

Since the roll-out of the free primary education programme in 2003, no public school has produced the top candidate in KCPE, effectively handing the baton to private schools, also known as academies. FILE

Between 1995 and 2002, Olympic Primary School in the heart of Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, was consistently ranked as the best in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examinations. Not anymore.
Since the roll-out of the free primary education programme in 2003, no public school has produced the top candidate in KCPE, effectively handing the baton to private schools, also known as academies.
For the first time, the government this year moved to mainstream early childhood development and education (ECDE) into basic education by allocating Sh1.6 billion to support public kindergartens, including employment of pre-primary teachers.
The provision of universal primary education in Kenya saw about 1.1 million children who had dropped out of school due to lack of fees enrol in public primary schools — growing total enrolment from 6.1 million in 2002 to 7.2 million pupils in 2003.

Annual budget
The existing infrastructure and human resources could hardly absorb the 18 per cent increase in numbers. Top performing State-funded schools such as Olympic, which had a pupil population of about 1,700 prior to the FPE plan, got more than 3,000 applications from learners who wanted to join the institution.

The annual budget of Sh1,020 per pupil set by the government is, however, not adequate in the face of increased learner population that was not matched by factors such as classrooms, teachers, learning and teaching materials.

A study carried out in 2011 by Uwezo, a non governmental organisation, shows learners in the academies perform better than their counterparts in the public schools in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

The research carried out in all the 47 counties in Kenya using a representative sample of 134,243 learners aged 10-16; found out that the pass rates for literacy and numeracy tests (combined) was 83 and 71 per cent in private and public schools respectively.

At Makini, a private school in Nairobi, the average pupil population per classroom is 28 and the school enrolled 22 candidates in the 2011 national examinations and emerged fourth nationally with a mean score of 406.97 out of a possible 500 marks.

At Olympic Primary, 293 candidates were booked for KCPE exam and posted an average mark of 289.2 with only four students posting marks beyond 400. It has 3,158 pupils handled by a staff of 28 teachers posted by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) and 12 volunteer teachers.

The pupil-teacher ratio at Olympic Primary is two times bloated in comparison with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) recommended level of 40:1.

Mr Kabui Mwai, the chairman of Kenya Private Schools Association, says the better performance by learners in private schools in contrast to public is tied to motivating and promoting the principle of performance-based contracting for teachers.

This view is also shared by Dr Sara Ruto, the East Africa regional manager at Uwezo who blames the culture of ‘complacency’ by teachers in public schools for the deteriorating performance.

“If you visit a typical public primary school, especially one that is distant from the tarmac road, you will find a rather casual approach to learning especially in the early years. Children may be in school but are not being taught. Teachers might be in school but not in the classroom ... or they might not be in school at all,” said Dr Ruto.

While private schools outperform their public counterparts at the elementary level, the tables turn in favour of State-run high schools in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) rankings.

This, education experts argue, is as a result of KCPE top dogs joining national and provincial secondary schools, which are all publicly funded, leaving private schools with learners whose entry behaviour is “academically inferior’” to those in State-funded institutions.

The Kenya government in 2008 implemented the Free Day Secondary Education where each student is allocated Sh10,625 per year to cater for tuition and learning materials, excluding boarding fees.

As a result, the transition rate from primary to secondary rose to a historical high of 74 per cent in 2012, up from 47 per cent in 2002, according to data from the Ministry of Education.

Dr Ruto says education is not all about providing funds, but rather ensuring there are enough teachers in schools.

The Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut), the teachers’ umbrella body, estimates that the public education system requires up to 75,000 more tutors.

Finance minister Njeru Githae set aside funds to recruit 10,000 teachers in the current financial year.

The recruitment has just been completed before they are posted.

In an attempt to address the widening gap in the performance of public and private schools, the Ministry of Education in 2011 put in place an admission quota system that reserved more places and lowered the entry bar for pupils from government schools, a move that was unsuccessfully contested in court by private school proprietors, who termed it “discriminatory.”

Dismissing petition

“If merit was the only criteria for admission into national schools, candidates from private schools would take most of the places available. This is why the 2nd Respondent (government) sought to temper merit with equity.”

The Second Respondent realised that the previous policy, based on merit alone, had occasioned unfairness and prejudice to the candidates from public schools and he sought to right it,” read the ruling by a three-judge Bench in dismissing the petition by the Kenya Private Schools Association.

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