When I look at today’s school programmes, one thing stands out: we never taught beyond the six hours prescribed by the Ministry of Education. This was a basic principle that balanced educational needs with human limitations, ensuring both teachers and students maintained their effectiveness.

The regulations stipulated nine 40-minute lessons daily for five days, totalling 45 lessons weekly. Under these instructional hours, I taught at Kolanya High School from July 1989 to February 1990. My heaviest teaching day was Thursday, with four lessons totalling three hours of student engagement before the official end time of 3:30pm. Despite being young and energetic then, those Thursdays left me drained. The other weekdays were comparatively lighter, allowing me time to catch my breath and maintain teaching quality.

Kenya’s curriculum-based establishment requires secondary school teachers to teach a maximum of 28 lessons weekly. Additional duties include lesson preparation, assignment marking (especially for mathematics and language teachers), student counselling, departmental meetings, parent consultations, and co-curricular activities. Students receive 21 hours of teaching time weekly, with 45-minute periods. This workload, while demanding, was designed to be sustainable and allow for comprehensive education without overwhelming either teachers or students.

While the nine daily lessons between 8am and 3:30am remain the norm, many schools have made exceptions standard practice. Though these hours aren’t rigid and can accommodate necessary adjustments, they were designed to allow effective teaching while ensuring adequate rest, reflection, and sleep for both teachers and students. The wisdom behind these regulated hours lies in understanding human capacity and the diminishing returns of extended learning periods.

However, numerous schools now disregard the Basic Regulations 2015 concerning school hours. They regularly hold classes from 7pm to 9:30pm, adding four more 45-minute lessons to the prescribed schedule. Some schools even conduct classes between 5am and 6am. This suggests serious cases of insomnia somewhere. The impact of these extended hours on student and teacher well-being remains largely unexamined, yet the practice continues to spread.

Some Kenyans justify this violation by citing excessive content that must be covered in limited time. Peter Kaaga noted on Facebook: “Top schools nowadays don’t even have games. PE lessons have been allocated to math lessons. Teaching goes up to 10pm and resumes at 4am. The only remedy is to rationalise the curriculum content time allocation.” This perspective reflects a concerning trend where academic achievement is prioritised at the expense of holistic development.

However, the heavy curriculum load argument is mythical. The Ministry of Education reviewed the initial 8.4.4 curriculum to match the weight of the defunct 7.4.2.3 system. The strongest evidence against this claim comes from principals whose schools excel in KCSE. They report completing the secondary school syllabus in Form Four’s first term, spending the remaining terms on revision and test preparation. This demonstrates that the current curriculum can be effectively delivered within standard hours.

While teaching outside stipulated hours isn’t unusual globally, educational jurisdictions regulate it carefully. The Philippines, for example, limits teaching overload to two hours daily or 10 hours weekly beyond the prescribed six hours. Teaching overload properly refers to actual classroom teaching exceeding the prescribed six daily hours – something very few Kenyan teachers do under Basic Education Regulations 2915. These international examples show how additional teaching hours can be implemented responsibly, with clear limitations and guidelines.

This oddity wasn’t present during my time at Kolanya High School. It emerged in the early 2000s, long after the government had revised the curriculum to a manageable load.

— The writer is a Communication Specialist; [email protected]