Free Primary Education has failed to meet its objectives

When it was launched, the Free Primary Education programme was seen as a good thing.

It still is but, sadly, the failure by the Government and donors to properly monitor it and correct imbalances, is beginning to affect the quality of education offered in public primary schools.

Not only that, but students with the potential to become future captains of industry are falling short, due to outright negligence on the part of the teachers, and the decrepit state of facilities in public schools.

The increase in the number of students failing to make the passing grades in Maths, English, Chemistry, Physics and Biology at high school level, can easily be traced to the rot that has crept into our public primary schools.

Primary education is the rock that determines the ability of a pupil to eventually make it to either university or a quality tertiary institution.

The time has come for politics to be divorced from FPE, so that honest and useful debate can result in setting up a system that jealously guards quality, but also ensures that no child is unable to access basic education due to poverty. While Nairobi still has arguably better-equipped schools than most towns and villages, even there, the ugly side of FPE has slowly taken root.

In Nairobi City Council-run schools, teachers are few, poorly paid and low in morale; they no longer have the ‘fire’ to educate their charges, and spend more time taking tea and ‘mandazis’ than teaching.

Tuition sessions

After the Government ‘abolished’ school fees, textbooks are few and far between, and only a third of pupils, sometimes fewer, can afford any.

Pupils are sometimes asked to clean the classrooms during their ‘tuition’ sessions, now disguised as afternoon study.

To teachers, the pupils have become a symptom of their employer’s lack of interest in their welfare. Some of these schools, which were once among the City’s best in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) national examinations, are now struggling.

The sudden swell in the number of children per class has seen the teacher-pupil ratio widen to an unhealthy level, leading to increased indiscipline, truancy and bullying.

Teachers feel no urge to guide weak pupils and some of them openly mock those who score poorly. This transformation of schools that were once among the best, did not happen overnight, but was the result of fortitude yielding to the unbearable weight of overwork and low pay. The school and the teacher are mirrors of similar depressing stories across the country.

Poor pay for teachers is just a small part of the problem.

The biggest problem is the quality of facilities in public schools, low access to learning materials and the low teacher-pupil ratio.

As the quality of education in public schools plummets, parents with enough income pull their children out of these schools and take them to private institutions, where teachers earn just slightly more than those in the employ of the Teachers Service Commission, but are better equipped to do their work.

This worsens the imbalance in quality and resources in favour of the latter, making a mockery of FPE.

The main purpose of FPE was to increase access to basic education, and thereby raise the literacy levels in the country that took a severe knock in the face of growing national poverty levels and dearth of funding. This remains a noble goal that should be fully supported. However, it is one thing to set goals, and quite another to achieve them.

Inadequate basics

Basic education is no longer enough in today’s world, where the stories of illiterate or semi-literate individuals rising to great wealth through their sweat, without engaging in corruption, are getting scarcer by the day.

Children need to be able to believe that education is indeed the key to a better life. While the self-made millionaire illiterates do prove that honest hard work can pay, they are hardly the ideal role models for the 21st century school-going child.