Reforms must bring respite to the Junior Secondary School pioneers

The education sector in Kenya is on the brink of a major transformation as the government begins to implement the recommendations of the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms.

At the basic education level, this process must provide some respite for the pioneer learners in Junior Secondary School (JSS) having faced challenges of shortage of teachers, lack of textbooks and inadequate STEM infrastructure in their first year of transition.

The beginning of the year was uncertain but the government attempted to create stability by deploying over 7,000 teachers and recruiting 21,000 additional ones to teach in JSS.

However, the move only led to a national staffing average of three to four teachers in JSS. Learners and teachers who are not inclined to STEM bore the greatest brunt of this inadequacy as they missed some learning hours and were forced to teach contents they were not confidently competent to handle, respectively.

I have interacted with teachers in some schools who have benefited from a community-of-practice collaboration framework among schools to enhance curriculum delivery.

Teachers who are leaning towards STEM from neighbouring secondary schools came in and assisted in laboratory-based lessons. We must plug the gap before we enter the second year of transition.

The just concluded recruitment of teachers should, at least, reduce the learning disparities to the 1.2 million learners who wrote their 2022 Kenya Primary School Education Assessment (KPSEA) and by extension the next groups.

Public schools must not always play catch-up with those in the private sector. Although the latter form an integral part of the system, the future of education in Kenya is public and adequate resourcing is irreducible.

The Basic Education Statistical Booklet shows that as of 2020, the number of public primary schools stood at 23,368, accounting for 74 percent of primary schools.

We need every institution to enhance access and equity. At the beginning of the year, only 13,000 primary public schools out of the 14,000 assessed were ready to admit JSS learners.

We must also know the behind-the-scene processes that have been ongoing to upgrade the about 10,000 schools that were locked out in the first approval phase.

This is important because basic education is not provided in silos but spirals in phases. Inability to offer service to learners in a higher phase is an indictment of the whole.

As we enter the last term of the year, we must solidify the gains made in transitioning to JSS and address the resource gaps across schools in readiness for the second cohort of learners.

The writer is an educator.