By The Eastern Newspaper team,
Even as the National Government rolled out the new competency-based curriculum in 2018, the free secondary education system was slowly dying as a result of poor planning and politicization of the way day secondary schools were managed in the country.
Most of the day secondary schools in Upper Eastern were a law unto themselves, with students enjoying much leeway with teachers a disappointed lot because they lacked the power to take necessary disciplinary action.
Former President Mwai Kibaki 2018 introduced a free day secondary school plan, with the government meeting the cost of tuition, while parents footed the bill covering boarding and uniform.
The jury is in and all agree that free secondary school is not free after all, as parents have had to dig into their pockets to foot myriad educational charges, including the boarding and uniform costs.
The day secondary schools continue to deliver low numbers of students to public universities every year. Many students are faced with numerous challenges brought about by stakeholders in the sector failing to confront the reality that things are amiss and need to be put right. The State has been blamed for not putting in place effective mechanisms that support teachers and students to excel.
On the other side, the parents in the schools are being blamed for poor parenting and for not supporting the schools. The uncooperative attitude of parents is cited as a major factor in the deteriorating performance of students. The outlawing of corporal punishment in school has left learners with nothing to fear but enjoy unprecedented freedom.
The government pays a grant of Sh12, 870 per secondary school student. It has also capped the maximum fees payable by parents at Sh9, 374 for day schools. This leaves parents who were convinced that the children will learn for free with a burden of taking care of the meals, transport, and school uniform.
The elephant in the room is the government enacted laws that prevented headteachers to neither send away fee defaulters nor retain their certificates after exams. The big question comes in, how are the headteachers expected to collect the school fees?
The Ministry of Interior and Coordination mopes up villages and ensures all the young people are in day secondary schools without caring whether they pay schools or not. Dr. Matiang’i led Ministry in collaboration with the Ministry of Education goes ahead to warn teachers against sending home fee defaulters. This is the awkward situation that the school principals in the Eastern region find themselves in and for that matter, they engage a ‘free gear’ kind of attitude in the management of the schools just to make their employer, TSC, happy.
The end product is poor performance in national exams and releases weak youth back to the community with little or no qualification to further their studies.
Under the country’s constitution, every child in Kenya has a right to free and compulsory basic education. It is mandatory for any parent who is a Kenyan or whose child resides in the country to enroll them for primary and secondary education, according to the Basic Education Act of 2013.
Kenya has over three million day secondary school students. Under the current arrangement, government and parents share the bill for utilities, the amount varying according to each school’s facilities though there are no mechanisms put in place to force parents or sponsors to pay school fees promptly.
Parents have to cover the salaries of non-teaching staff – such as watchmen, cooks, groundsmen a situation that raises the recurrent expenditure in the schools with the parents playing minimal roles. They also pay for teachers employed by boards and the salaries vary from school to school as there is no fixed rate.
The same goes for non-teaching staff in the country. They should be paid a minimum wage, but because of low funds, most schools don’t do this a situation that worsens service delivery that leads to poor performance in national exams.
Surveys done in the Upper Eastern counties reveal that the discipline levels are very low among the majority of day secondary school students. Images of them misbehaving in public places are a common scenario that shocks people who schooled in the earlier days when teachers were kings and tough disciplinarians.
A closer look at the root cause of this vice takes us back to the new law that scrapped corporal punishment in schools. What this means that students have the liberty to attend lessons as they wish. Teachers are tied; they can neither apply corporal punishment nor expel the misbehaving students and if that has to happen then the school management must be involved.
The result of all these negative issues is a failure in national exams and bringing out of a society with poor moral standards among the youth.
Germano Nyaga a member of a board of management in a day secondary school in Meru County says most teachers in his school are demoralized as a result of increased cases of students’ indiscipline.
“At my school, the records show that there is no one particular time when we had 100 percent attendance, the learners attend school at will for the simple reason that the law protects them from corporal punishment and expulsion. It is regrettable,” Gitonga told The Eastern Newspaper.
Celina Lamayan, a secondary school teacher in Samburu County says parents just release their children to the schools but they are very reluctant when it comes to paying school fees, a situation that leaves the institutions struggling to operate.
The government doesn’t cater for continuous assessment tests in the Day secondary schools, hence living very little room for testing the students during course work. This situation has contributed immensely to the poor grades recorded in the schools. If the Kenyan government is to implement a policy of truly free secondary education in Kenya, it will also have to shoulder the burden of regular assessment tests and build new classrooms and laboratories.
In addition to the cost of day secondary schools, Kenyan researchers have found that some students drop out because they don’t have uniforms and can’t pay for lunch.
If the cost of lunch and a uniform is not covered by the government, then the proposed policy should not be called “free tuition”, Dr. John Mugo, the Kenya country coordinator of Uwezo, an organization that promotes literacy in the East Africa, said.
The Uhuru Kenyatta administration had promised to fully fund secondary education, but this has not been executed.
To get the cost to the government, the total fee payable for a student is multiplied by the number of students, additional costs such as utilities, administration, and classrooms should also be considered.
Experts see the issue of free education in day secondary schools as a political strategy that has no framework to ensure that the government takes measures to grow a whole student putting into consideration the issues of discipline and performance in national exams.
The National Government is for sure hiding in this by calling it free education but failing to allocate enough resources in the sector and pass good legislation that will ensure discipline among the students.
In Kenya, it is time for all stakeholders to put their minds together and address the thorny issues in the education system.
