While the government’s plans to roll out free secondary education next year is a noble initiative, it is prudent that the exercise be handled with great care.
The government has announced that top national secondary schools are among 19 traditional boarding institutions that will open day wings from next month.
The move is aimed at boosting capacity and also delinking admission to bed space under the free secondary education plan.
We must, however, hasten to warn that we need to be very careful on tampering too much and too suddenly with our public high schools.
The reason we say is that opening day wings in top national boarding schools is an uncharted territory that could boomerang with lasting and negative impact.
The Ministry of Education announced that the opening of day wings at boarding schools would start in Nairobi before being rolled out in other counties.
The government must tread carefully in order to ensure that performance and quality of education at these institutions is not affected negatively.
Even as we increase the number of students at these schools, are we going to ensure that the number of teachers and adequate facilities are put in place before the exercise kicks off?
Public schools are rightly worried about the lack of cash allocation to build more classrooms for the additional students.
The last thing we need are congested classrooms at these institutions. We can all remember the chaos that followed the introduction of free primary school education. Some previously top exam performers have never recovered from the deluge of pupils as quality of teaching and performance stagnated.
No one opposes plans to give more children access to these top schools, but the most idealistic route would be for the government to roll out measures at all schools so as to ensure parity.
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