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At the turn of the year, a teacher from Nyeri lamented that even as her school was preparing to receive students for the new term, teachers were facing a humongous crisis because the school does not have a classroom to accommodate Grade Nines.

“The Competency-Based Curriculum requires us to be innovative, engage in critical thinking and problem solving, but we do not know what to do in this circumstance,” she said. One option was for teachers to vacate the staff room to accommodate students, but where would they work from? Ironically, a nearby secondary school has an empty classroom, as secondary schools will no longer be admitting Form One students starting this year.

The teacher’s lament encapsulated a slice of the challenges that public schools countrywide face as they prepare to receive students this week, including delays in releasing capitation. This is the money that the government allocates every student to pay for their tuition and to buy learning and teaching materials.

Although the Ministry of Education said it had released Sh48.4 billion for public primary and secondary schools at the weekend, this is unlikely to be sufficient to meet the needs for this term, given that schools owe suppliers for last year and principals will be under pressure to clear old debts before they can spend on current student needs.

It has also not been lost on observers of the education sector that there is a debilitating shortage of teachers, particularly for Junior Secondary Schools, in part because the new curriculum was hurriedly implemented and stakeholders were not given sufficient time to prepare for the big switch. And we have not even addressed the dearth of facilities such as labs and the attendant equipment, which are virtually inexistent in many public primary schools.

Let us not forget also that publishers were not given sufficient time to come up with books to suit the new pedagogy needs, and in the past one month, their workers have been living at work to ensure that the materials are ready. Even this is a major expectation because there are several stages involved before the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) can approve the materials and give the signal for publishers to start printing the books, all of which require heavy investment in time and money.

The result has been a shortage of books in retail outlets as schools wait for KICD to issue the list of approved texts. As late as yesterday, KICD was still engaging the Kenya Publishers Association with a view to fast-tracking the printing of the required books

It is, in my view, difficult under such circumstances for stakeholders to give their best. The pressure brought to bear on them, including printers, will be felt in the quality of the books that they must release at short notice and against a background of pending payments for books supplied earlier.

Clearly, the challenges that the public education sector faces are hydra-headed and it is difficult to contemplate where ministry mandarins ought to start if they were to put their hearts and heads to addressing them. However, now more than ever, there is a need for education experts to come together and find solutions that will be beneficial to students while alleviating the pressure on parents, guardians, teachers and school managers in both the short and medium term.

For instance, what needs to be done to raise the quality of education in primary schools? The current standards fall far short of the ideal and the situation is made worse by the centralised way in which the sector is managed, starting with procurement of books. We also need to ask ourselves what we need to do to upgrade infrastructure to bring all schools up to par and enable them to compete favourably with private institutions. And equally important, we should ask what will happen to the empty classrooms in secondary schools when we have students without a place to sit in primary schools.

These are complex problems that call for constant interrogation of the way the curriculum is implemented, not to mention how schools and the entire education sector is managed from nursery school to the tertiary level. The ultimate question then is: Does the government have what it takes to fix this mess, and if not, is it willing to engage experts to come up with workable solutions?

— The writer is the Editor-in-Chief of The Nairobi Law Monthly and Nairobi Business Monthly; [email protected]