Despite Education Reforms, Are All Our Children Learning?

Despite Kenya’s pursuit of legal, policy, and institutional reforms in education since 2010, there’s still no significant improvement in learning outcomes. A recently released report has shown that children’s education in the country is not only low but inequitably distributed.

The Uwezo Assessment Report, which was released on Friday 11 by Usawa Agenda, the non-profit organization championing equitable and quality education in Kenya, surveyed over 38,000 in 1775 primary schools in 46 counties as it sought to answer the question: Are ALL Our Children Learning?  

It focused on the ability of children to read and comprehend English and Kiswahili, as well as complete basic numeracy tasks, set at grade 3 level.

The report affirmed a more salient issue that has been surfaced over the years – inequity. These shades of inequality glared in the lens of disability, geographical placement pitting rural to urban areas, gender, low against the high-income households, the dichotomy of private versus public primary schools, and variations across the counties.

The outcomes were worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to a loss of learning among many school-going children. For instance, it found out that only 2 in 5 grade 4 learners are at least meeting expectations in reading a grade 3 appropriate English text.

Consequently, grade 4 children born to mothers with tertiary education are 80 percent and 62 percent more likely to meet or exceed expectations in reading a grade 3 appropriate English text and solving a grade 3 appropriate numeracy problem respectively than those born to mothers with utmost primary education.

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Children with a disability still bear the biggest brunt in regards to learning. This is particularly so pronounced in rural areas. Usawa Agenda’s report showed that 1 in 5 girls with disability dropped out of school due to Covid-19 enforced schools’ closure.

From 2019, the Ministry of Education began the national roll-out of the competency-based curriculum as a hallmark of the education reforms. The curriculum lauded widely by many stakeholders was seen as the panacea to addressing quality concerns.

There is, however, a sharp contrast between the education inputs and the learning outcomes – indeed, children are in school but most are not learning. Part of the reason includes inadequate teacher training, or lack, thereof, of tutors capable of transitioning the children to the new form of learning.

The report further highlights school factors that influence learning and underscores observable inequalities as well as reckons with the underlying drivers of learning outcomes and their distribution.

It indicated that the teacher/classroom ratio remains the most significant school-level factor that contributes positively to the school’s mean score in national examinations. In addition, 3 in 10 children of pre-school age are out of school and 3 in 10 children enrolled in ECDE are overage.

While these are some of the notable key findings from the report, the picture of inequality in learning outcomes could perhaps be considered as one of the greatest challenges to universalizing basic education.

Executive Director of Usawa Agenda, Emmanuel Manyasa is optimistic that the data from the survey would help policy and decision-makers to re-focus and where necessary change course to ensure equity in education.

“It is my expectation that everyone who reads this report, whether through the lenses of the national goals of education, or the global vision of an equitable quality education, will find it worth of dispassionate engagement with,” Manyasa said during the report launch.

The Ministry of Education and the country at large have pursued policies aimed at deepening access, improving quality, relevance, and transition at critical levels of basic education – but is this enough to get all our children learning?

Get more insights on the report by grabbing a copy through this link: https://usawaagenda.org/project/uwezo-learning-assessment-2021/