By Our Reporter
The government has taken over the management of Early Grade Reading (Let’s read) programme that has transformed reading fluency among pupils in public primary schools for the last eight years.
The programme was funded by United States Agency (USAID) and implemented by Research Triangle International (RTI) in partnership with the government of Kenya.
The programme aimed to improve teacher capacity for effective delivery methods of classroom instruction and to similarly improve access to appropriate textbooks and supplementary materials in literacy.
It has benefited 7.8 million pupils and approximately 87,100 teachers across Kenya across the country since its inception in 2015.
The Director for Primary Education in the Ministry of Education, Mrs. Nereah Olick thanked USAID and RTI saying the programme had improved the reading fluency of hundreds of learners, some of whom could hardly recognize the letters of the alphabet before the inception of the programme.
“Learners who broke into tears when asked to read have been able to become better readers,” Ms Olik recalled, saying this not only made the children happy, but also made the teachers and the parents happy.
She spoke during the handover ceremony at a hotel in Naivasha. The occasion was graced by the Chief of Party of RTI, Mr. Julius mulindwa, Basic Education Team Leader, Education and Youth, USAID Kenya and East Africa, Lillian Gangla, senior officials from the Ministry of education and RTI.
Mrs. Olick said the government had through the experience from TUSOME programme, centralized the procurement of textbooks thereby realizing a 1:1 pupil to textbook ratio in public primary and secondary schools for all subjects.
Just how effective Tusome effect has was demonstrated when the USAID funded a reading remediation programme, which was implemented by RIT following the disruption to learning by COVID-19 pandemic, to compensate for the learning losses incurred during the prolonged closure of schools.
A Deputy Director for Education at Kenya Education Management Institute, Ms Joyce Kirima said a recent external evaluation showed that in a one-year span from 2015 -2016 there has been a reduction in the proportion of non-readers in English grade 2 from 38% to12%.
“The proportion of children reading fluently has increased from 12% to 27% within the same time,” she noted.
As for Kiswahili, she further said, the proportion of non-readers in grade 2 was reduced from 43% to 19% while the proportion of fluent readers increased from 4% to 12% over the same period.
The Chairman of the Kenya Publishers Association, Mr. Kiare Kamau said textbook publishing community in Kenya had benefited from the training that the programme extended to them.
He said Competence Based Curriculum rode on the training that Tusome had given teachers and other players in education during its initial phases of its implementation.
The Nakuru County Director of Education, Victoria Mulili thanked USAID, RTI and the government saying the Tusome programme had changed the landscape of reading in public schools.
She said it had caused a perceptible change in reading and writing including attitudes to education among those who took part in its implementation.
She expressed the need for the government to sustain to benefit more cohorts of learners and teachers.
The Programme is based on the results of pilot studies carried out under the Primary Mathematics and Reading (PRIMR) initiative in 547 schools in five counties, namely Nairobi, Nakuru, Kisumu, Kiambu and Murang’a.
PRIMR was designed and implemented by the MoE with financial support from 2011 to 2014.
Results of PRIMR initiative indicated that well-designed syllabus-based teacher’ guides, intensive teacher training, and targeted ongoing support through Teachers Advisory Centers (TAC) tutors could improve instruction, leading to significant gains in pupil literacy and numeracy performance.
TUSOME programme was designed as a national literacy programme to ride on the gains realized in PRIMR.
