Last month, the Principal Secretary for Basic Education, Prof. Julius Bitoko, said that the government was exploring ways and means of closing the achievement gap between schools in rural areas and those in urban areas.
He spoke at a town hall meeting with stakeholders dubbed “Elimu Mashinani” at Maasai Mara University, where officials, led by its Cabinet Secretary, Mr Julius Ogamba, fielded questions from the public and responded to them as they should.
The televised engagement provided an opportunity for parents, students, lecturers, and opinion leaders to raise pertinent issues affecting access to quality education and training among the Kenyan population.
I was particularly excited by the commitment Prof. Bitoko gave, saying that the government would close the marginal difference in performance between rural and urban schools.
Although the distinction in the delivery of education may roughly be rural versus urban, the real difference in educational outcomes is between public primary schools and private primary schools.
It wasn’t like this before. For many years, learners in schools in rural areas received quality educational experiences as their counterparts in urban areas. The current generation of policymakers, both in and outside government, attended primary education in rural areas.
They were schooled and sat for their Certificate of Primary Education (CPE) under the old system of education, and their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) for the early generation of 8.4.4 in rural and public schools.
There were strong management, supervision, and inspection structures for the delivery of education services across the country.
We had an office, staffed with Zonal Inspectors of Schools and Teachers’ Advisory Centres, which provided officers who inspected, supervised, and offered professional services to teachers in Primary schools.
The office, under the guidance of the Assistant Education Officer (AEO), provided in-service training services mainly on content knowledge, after assessing the unique needs of the teachers in a given catchment area.
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The officers also generated insightful reports relevant to the strategic issues on teaching and learning in their respective areas for consumption by the AEO, District Education Office, Provincial Education, the Ministry of Education headquarters and the Teachers Service Commission. The issues were promptly acted upon.
The officials of the Ministry—working in tandem with the TSC—enforced the policies, rules and regulations to ensure that schools implemented the curriculum as per the books. The control included the strict administration of examinations, which are administered at the end of each school year. Whatever infractions there were over these were dealt with ruthlessly. Everyone toed the line.
It was within this context that primary schools in rural areas sent their CPE or KCPE candidates straight to the old 18 national schools and the many elite provincial secondary schools there were then.
Something changed in 2003. This was the year the government introduced Free Primary Education (FPE) in 2003. The new policy led to massive enrollment of learners into public primary schools.
The development was associated with the emergence of the private primary school system. Middle-class parents enrolled their children on these schools. The schools were mainly in urban or peri-urban areas.
Education experts have always attributed the comparatively poor performance of public primary schools in KCPE to the emergence of the private primary school system.
Proportionally, learners who score 380 marks out of the maximum 500 marks are from private primary schools. In the absence of affirmative action, they took away more than 70 per cent of Form One slots in national and provincial schools.
It was this imbalance in performance in KCPE that led the then Permanent Secretary for Education, Prof. James Ole Kiayapi, to introduce affirmative action in the selection of standard eight pupils in Form One.
In the best of all possible worlds, the emergence of the private school system shouldn’t have affected the supervision, inspection and control of the delivery of education services to learners in basic education institutions.
On the contrary, the government should have strengthened all the control factors responsible for access to equitable quality education for all children, regardless of their socioeconomic background.
In the old days, District Education Offices had an administrative wing headed by a District Education Officer and a School Inspectorate wing headed by an Inspector of Schools.
Under the school inspectorate wing, there were inspectors specialised in disciplines or subjects. These are the people who carried out supervisory visits to improve the quality of teaching in schools in their respective subjects of specialisation. They also helped conduct in-service training for teachers in both content and pedagogical knowledge—knowledge of the subjects taught and appropriate teaching techniques.
A freeze in employment has led to education officers retiring over the years with no replacements. We have thousands of schools than we had in 2003. The combined total of basic educational institutions, public and private primary and secondary schools, is about 60,000. The staff is insufficient to provide adequate inspection and supervision of the schools.
All the schools need inspection and supervision. Inspection of structures in school. Inspection of teaching and learning. To conduct in-service training in weak or difficult subject areas based on assessment of teaching and learning. To inspect, educate and advise teachers on the best implementation of school development plans.
In my opinion, the government should not so much close the gap between urban and rural schools in terms of quality education; it should also rigorously enforce the education policy, standards, curriculum and examinations in its letter and spirit.
The foundation for rigorous enforcement of education policy, standards, curricula and examinations requires five things: adequate infrastructure in schools; improvement of staffing levels; enhancement of inspection and supervision of schools; hiring and thorough training of staff in education administration and inspection and supervision; and targeted training of teachers in the subject matter as well as training in the management of educational institutions.
Apart from ensuring the professional and ethical implementation of the curriculum, the government may also need to address the vexing problem of cheating in national examinations.
The examination results of any school should be, like Caesar’s wife, beyond suspicion, regardless of whether the school is public or private—secondary or primary school.
Curriculum planning is a continuum, a chain.
A curriculum planner, Clarence E. Beeby, a New Zealand educationalist, says: “Covers first of all either a statement, or an assumption, of the aims of your schooling, of the kind of youngsters and the kind of adults you are trying to produce.
Secondly, it contains a statement of the content of what the children are to learn and experience and of the amount of choice they will have within that content.
Thirdly, a statement of the method or methods that are most likely to achieve these aims.
Fourthly, the curriculum must contain a statement of how the work of the schools is to be evaluated.”
Closing the achievement gap between rural and urban schools requires that the government ensure the rigour underlying each stage is attained. It requires utmost vigilance at each stage.
By Kennedy Buhere
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