Long history of FPE hiccups

After the introduction of the building levy, is estimated that one or two million pupils dropped out. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

  • While the more famous FPE attempt was made by the Narc government in 2003, a similar but catastrophic attempt had been made three decades earlier.
  • Similar to the 2003 Act, the presidential decrees were not made with due consideration of the existing realities.
  • The upsurge in enrolment ate into its efficiency and after the 1978 school milk programme decree was issued, the body crumbled

By Morris Kiruga
[email protected]

Free Primary Education (FPE) has always been a goal in independent Kenya.

While the more famous FPE attempt was made by the Narc government in 2003, a similar but catastrophic attempt had been made three decades earlier.

The goal of FPE has always been to offer every child access to an education.

However, a nagging problem in FPE implementation has been how to match the faculties and facilities to the expected surge in demand.

Even with proper implementation, increasing the availability and quality of learning resources fast enough to mitigate a crisis or counter-productivity is near impossible.

The hastily done programme of the 1970s would suffer this and instead ruin the very system it sought to promote.

ABOLISHED FEES

In 1971, Jomo Kenyatta issued a presidential decree that abolished tuition fees in some areas.

These included North-Eastern Province, the districts of Marsabit, Isiolo and Samburu in Eastern Province; Turkana, West Pokot, Baringo, Narok, Elgeyo-Marakwet and Olkejuado in Rift Valley; Tana River and Lamu in Coast.

The decree was limited to marginalised areas and those that were considered arid and semi-arid.

Two years later, another presidential decree was issued providing FPE for pupils in their first four years of primary education.

Similar to the 2003 Act, the presidential decrees were not made with due consideration of the existing realities.

The implementation machinery wanting, the announcement, as Maurice Amutabi notes in Political Interference in the Running of Education in post-independence Kenya, created “great panic and whirlpools in the education circles.

MASSIVE RECRUITMENT

This was manifested by massive recruitment of teachers on almost an ad hoc basis.

This decree instantly raised enrolment in primary schools from 1.8 million in 1973 to 2.8 million in January 1974.”

Under the colonial government, education had been notoriously segregated and the few Africans who could access it had already been absorbed into the civil service and private industries.

The looming human resource crisis, ironically, was starkest in the very solution sought to mitigate it.

Teacher student ratio increased from an average 55:1 in 1973 to 124:1 in 1974. Although the 1973 numbers were decent, there was still a shortage of trained teachers.

Of the 56, 000 teachers Kenya had then, a whooping 12,600 were untrained.

With the political decree, a further 25, 000 teachers were needed the next year.

The feeble attempts to close this gap increased the number of untrained teachers to 40, 000 by 1975 when the total teaching force was 90,000.

BUILDING FUND

Most school committees, recognising that school management was impossible without funding, and seeing no alternative from the government, simply institutionalised and exploited the ‘‘building fund.’’

The fund was ostensibly designed to provide physical facilities as a long-term goal and was thus, until 1974, a small fraction of the annual school fees.

Once ‘‘legalised’’, however, the fund replaced and outdid school fees.

Parents now had to pay more for education of a lower quality. The instruction and learning materials were missing.

The classes were insufficient.

To handle the numbers, ingenious schools devised double sessions: one in the morning and another in the afternoon.

This adaptation’s possible merits were killed by the lack of sufficient teachers.

In the end, the presidential decree sent the educational system into frenzy, and then on a downward spiral.

DROPPED OUT

After the introduction of the building levy, Amutabi estimates that one or two million pupils dropped out.

Enrolment numbers dropped again to their pre-decree levels. Instead of promoting government-sponsored education, the FPE’s misgivings boosted the increase of privately owned schools.

In 1979, another similar directive sought to declare FPE by abolishing the remaining fees for Class 5-7.

However, Moi’s decree was tempered by the marked increase in enrolments in Teacher Training Colleges.

Its effect was not as extreme as the 1973 decree had been but it contributed to the deterioration of the education system.

In the second decade after independence, emphasis shifted from teaching and learning to construction.

Among the institutional casualties of the FPE was the Kenya School Equipment Scheme (KSES). Formed in 1969, the KSES was an efficiency marvel within the ministry of education pre-1973.

The upsurge in enrolment ate into its efficiency and after the 1978 school milk programme decree was issued, the body crumbled.