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Government and Policy

Usawa Agenda’s First-Ever Secondary School Report Spotlights The Inequities In The System

BY Soko Directory Team · May 6, 2022 08:05 am

KEY POINTS

The assessment was done in 376 secondary schools, 8 from each county across Kenya. It was informed by the fact that secondary education is critical in the career paths that young Kenyans can take.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The report attempts to tackle the salient issue that the country has faced over the years  – inequity in our school systems.

Usawa Agenda will be launching its first-ever secondary school assessment report at the LLA – National Museum of Kenya. The report sought to determine whether Kenya’s secondary school system is inequitable by design.

The assessment was done in 376 secondary schools, 8 from each county across Kenya. It was informed by the fact that secondary education is critical in the career paths that young Kenyans can take. This is particularly so because not performing well in secondary school has greater ramifications for young Kenyans than any other level of their education.

Today there are many young Kenyans who have studied hard to acquire university degrees, but cannot be deployed at the same grade as their fellow university graduates because of their form four grade – that is how consequential achievement at the secondary school level is!

This report notes the fact that the grade a learner obtains in his/her Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations is not entirely dependent on their ability and/or effort.

Many factors impact this grade, most of them outside of the learner’s control. Yet the learner almost singly bears the full responsibility for the grade they obtain. Most of these factors are school-level, while some are beyond the school. Based on anecdotal evidence, and sometimes in the glaring exhibition of herd behavior, parents and learners scramble for limited spaces in the perceived best performing schools, while many secondary schools remain with a sub-optimal number of learners.

By asking the question “Is our secondary school system inequitable by design?” Usawa Agenda is showing its commitment to investigating and exposing the multiple factors that drive the academic performance of Kenya’s public secondary schools (which educate most of the learners).

The report attempts to tackle the salient issue that the country has faced over the years  – inequity in our school systems. It provides insights into the drivers of learning and academic performance in public secondary schools in Kenya, with a clear focus on the underlying structure that perpetuates systemic inequities.

Furthermore, the report highlights the categorization of schools into national, extra-county, county, and sub-county schools and the inequitable distribution of public resources among the different cadres of schools.

Given that this categorization is neither provided for in the Basic Education Act of 2013 nor the Sessional paper number 1 of 2019, the Usawa Agenda, through the report says that it finds it difficult to rationalize the continued use of this order to skew the allocation of public resources (including teachers) in the secondary school sub-sector.

Over the years, Kenya has pursued legal, policy, and institutional reforms in education including recognizing education as a constitutional right, the provision of education becoming a shared function between the National and County governments; and the  Teachers’ Service Commission (TSC) being established as an independent Constitutional Commission managing everything about teachers.

In 2003 and 2008, Kenya implemented the Free Primary Education Policy and the Free Day Secondary Education policy, respectively. The Ministry of Education and the country, in general, have pursued policies that seek to deepen access and improve quality, relevance, and transition at critical levels of basic education.

Despite these developments, however, there’s still sharp contrast between the education inputs and the learning outcomes. Children are in school but are not learning.

Usawa Agenda, through its secondary school assessment report, points out the inequities that have made many schools fail to live up to the expectations of learners, parents, and the public, while a few schools, educating a minority fraction of the learners are lavished with public resources beyond their need.

It is the desire to contribute to the that motivated Usawa Agenda to carry out the study. It dives deep into the issues that have simmered for a long.

You can be a part of the report launch by joining through this Zoom link.

Read More: Usawa Agenda to Launch Report Highlighting Challenges of ECDE Learning in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements

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