By Wachira Kigotho

Free primary education, which is the epicentre of emerging political crisis, has only but benefited the not so needy in society.

According to education researchers at the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, enrolment and achievement rates in most public schools in Kenya are going down while enrolment in private schools has tripled in the last seven years.

In a study Free Primary Education in Kenya: Enrolment, Achievement and Local Accountability, the researchers describe how abolition of tuition fees has impacted negatively on public primary schools.

"As the poor pupils came in, richer students fled to private schools in large numbers or in equal measure," says the report.

By examining results of the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education over time, researchers nailed the problem to the large performance gap between private and public schools.

"Flight to private schools in Kenya is associated with fall in academic performance in public schools," states Dr Tessa Bold, team leader of the study.

Since 2003, KCPE mean score in public schools has stagnated at about 240 points compared to 300 points for private schools. According to the study that was commissioned by the British Department for International Development, the demand for private primary education has not only increased but also its cost.

Even with abolition of school fees, the cost of private primary education has steadily increased.

"It is now more than 20 times more expensive than in public schools," says Dr Mwangi Kimenyi, a former director of the state-owned Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis and currently a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, who was also a member of the study team.

But as pupils from rich households flee public schools, trends in primary education system in urban areas show a relatively high utilisation of private schools in the slums. The issue is that despite the push for the free primary education, the Government has not provided schools in the slums.

According to African Population and Health Research Centre, the poor in the slums seem to have been pushed out of public primary schools and have opted for ‘private schools for the poor’ in the slums.

"Inadequate public spending on education in the slums, have resulted in the poor being chased away from the public system and pushed to using low-cost private schools," say APHRC researchers.

Currently, Nairobi has about 500 ‘private schools for the poor’ located within informal settlements. Unfortunately pupils from those schools on average achieve lower mean scores in KCPE than their counterparts in formal settlements and urban estates.

However, the problem of reduced academic achievement is likely to spread even further and impact on most of the 18,130 public primary schools.

With the Government spending 97 per cent of its education budget on teachers salaries and nothing on infrastructure and textbooks after key donors withdrew support to the free primary education, most public schools are going to join ranks of the slum schools. Even before donors highlighted corruption in the Free Primary Education programme, Unesco had faulted the Government on its failure to build more new schools, increase classrooms in the existing schools and employ more teachers. A comprehensive audit of the programme showed 60 per cent of public schools are crowded.

The situation is so critical in that while education officials spent millions of shillings on ‘ghost seminars,’ some public schools had only roofs and no walls.

"In worst cases, pupils learn under trees because there are no classrooms," says the report.

But as parents pressurise their children to perform well in hope of doing well in KCPE, Unesco says congested and overstretched classrooms have created unhealthy and uncomfortable conditions in schools. Some schools especially in rural areas were reported having no toilets.

Besides sharing inadequate facilities and learning resources, free primary education is riddled with issues of poor planning, low teacher and parental accountability, older pupils in lower classes, repetition, teacher shortages and emerging dropout rates.

"After initial increase in enrolment, public schools are beginning to experience a decline in enrolment due to dropouts and to a lesser degree, transfer to private schools," says Unesco.

This is the scenario that was noted last year by Oxford researchers who attributed the problem to low academic achievement in public schools. The political euphoria that ushered free primary education is over and parents and pupils are asking hard questions about merits of poor quality basic education.