Kenyan pupils ranked top in the region

Photo/FILE

Pupils of St Elizabeth Academy in Karen, Nairobi on January 12, 2011. A new survey shows Kenyan pupils perform better than their counterparts in the region.

Pupils in Kenya perform better in Kiswahili than their Tanzanian counterparts.

In a survey released on Monday in Dar es Salaam, Kenya scooped the first 24 slots in a ranking of 135 selected districts across the East African Community.

Kiswahili is the medium of instruction in Tanzanian schools.

The Kenyan pupils came out on top in a standard test administered to gauge basic ability to read letters, words, a sentence and finally a paragraph in a text.

“Even on a test where children in Tanzania ought to have an advantage over those in Kenya, they performed worse,” the survey findings say.

The tests, conducted by an educational think tank, Uwezo, also examined simple ability to compute numbers as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

A total of 68,945 children were interviewed from Kenya, 34,752 from Uganda and 42,033 from Tanzania, all aged between six and 16 years.

The tests used were of Standard Two level and were designed to be consistent with the requirements of each country’s curriculum, the survey notes.

“Standard Two was selected as international standards note that after two years of schooling a pupil is expected to have basic competencies in words and numbers,” the report says.

According to the findings, in all three countries, pupils performed poorly compared to the established curriculum levels.

For instance, two out of three children in Standard Three failed to pass the tests for English, Kiswahili and numeracy.

In the Kiswahili (for Kenya and Tanzania) reading sentences as “baba amejenga nyumba nzuri” or “nyumba yetu imezungukwa na miti” were tested.

In English (for Kenya and Uganda) sentences as “Juma is living in a small village. He gets a letter once in a month” were used to test the pupil’s ability.

In Kenya, only 28 per cent of the children were able to read with ease followed by Uganda at eight per cent and Tanzania at four per cent.

“These results are a cause for concern, as the expectation is that all children in Standard Three should be able to satisfactorily complete a Standard Two test.”

The findings show that only when pupils reached Standard Seven do they acquire Standard Two skills, “though in Tanzania half of Standard Seven were still unable.”

“Children in Tanzania performed worse even in the Kiswahili test, a language which they are more exposed to than children in Kenya.”

In Uganda and Kenya, English is presumably more widely spoken than in Tanzania. “There is a crisis of learning in the three countries,” says the report.

In Tanzania, the report says that 23 per cent of the teachers are not in school on any given day, and when in school, they spend half their time outside the classroom.