It’s become fashionable for Kenyans to joke about the names and types of schools they attended on social media, especially when people coalesce around performance in national examinations, professions, pay structure, and infrastructure.
While the debates are no banter worth spending a lot of time on and are dissolved easily as “nothing personal”, it is intriguing how some schools sit in painful solitude in terms of infrastructure, pupil population, teacher numbers and motivation, road access, and basic facilities including latrines and staff rooms.
Those who perform well in such “bad schools” are often egged on to do better in secondary schools if they could manage a stellar performance in a primary school that was so much neglected either by the government or the neighbourhood, including the alumni guffawing about “good” and “bad” schools.
A Plain got a rare encounter with a primary school teacher who opened up on how “schools are not the same”. We reproduce his interview without revealing his identity so that we don’t expose him to undue scrutiny and pressure from a plethora of interests.
Here is the teacher’s narration to A Plain:
“The belief that schools are the same or similar because teachers, for example, are trained from the same TTCs (teacher training colleges) is not true. Schools are different in terms of teacher motivation, access and how the community is embracing education.
Some schools can’t grow because the local community has a tight grip on the institution to the extent that anybody else, including the teaching fraternity, cannot have a say.
It is not uncommon to hear people claiming the school was theirs and no one else was allowed to ‘interfere’. Any ‘outsider’ making turnaround suggestions is easily dismissed as people without a stake worth talking about.
That way, teachers in particular zones have designated a few schools as ‘disciplinary grounds’ where the wretched of the earth are dumped to rot and retire.
Teachers facing discipline cases are pushed there to mark time before they retire. In fact, when teachers are taken to these neglected schools, the tutors take it as a kind punishment because they were between a rock and a hard place. They faced the sack, for example.
Sometimes, they are transferred under the influence of teacher unions that fight for them to remain in service. Because of this, the victims report to their ‘disciplinary grounds’ with unmatched meekness lest they lose their dear jobs.
Even headteachers who are taken to such schools know why they have been taken there. They go there chiefly to secure their jobs while not concerned about how the school can be turned around. Anyone pushed that direction is happy to continue earning instead of being jobless.
Some of these difficult learning centres are literally inaccessible. They are carelessly squeezed between ugly protruding hills whose roads network is a painful distraction even to the die-hard optimists. Unfortunately the ‘reject’ teachers who are taken there have no intention of thinking outside the box.
While others are accessible and are the oldest, ‘ownership’ politics has turned them into a laughing stock. Installations that are dust-covered while their fences are porous and boundaries faint, returning an ugly image for a school that nobody wants to associate with.
Education-conscious families either send their children to neighbouring public schools or, thanks to ability to pay, choose private institutions.
Such schools are ever-understaffed because no teacher wants to go there. The only teachers who go there willing to work are the fresh graduates who have no idea what they were getting into. Unfortunately, once they report to that school, it does take long before they are influenced by their less motivated colleagues who do nothing more that watching calendar days to the pay day.
At such schools, KCPE examination candidates perform poorly, the majority scoring less than 200 marks of the possible 500. So, it is not true that schools are the same or similar.” That’s how this teacher unburdened.
According to the Education Act 2013, basic education is free and compulsory. Under the 100 percent transition policy that the government calls “zero wastage”, Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha has been combing villages and informal settlements to ensure all the KCPE candidates join Form One.
In the 2020 KCPE examination whose results were released in April 2021, the candidates were 1,179,192 while the top scorer got 433 marks.
While Form Ones reported between August 2 and 6 and are now on mid-term break, others were yet to go to school at a time Kenya is cruising with a tight programme to recover the period lost to Covid-19.
Regions such as Central Kenya have registered more than 100 percent transition but the Coast trails with a disappointing 60 percent.
