Why late minister Mutula Kilonzo fought holiday tuition

Not many people can remember the late former Education minister Mutula Kilonzo and what he did in his tenure.

Kilonzo was appointed to the docket in early 2012. He presided over the formulation of laws that today govern education policy, standards, the curriculum, examinations, and school administration.

Those in the sector, however, remember him for addressing three things relevant to access to equitable quality education that casual observers couldn’t see.

A few weeks after the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) announced plans to increase KCPE and KCSE examinations fees, Kilonzo said the government would meet the cost of administering examinations, as this is implied in the section on free and compulsory education in the Constitution.

I remember the minister arguing that KCPE and KCSE were critical to the transition of learners from primary to secondary school and certification, grading and further education, training and pursuit of employment. It followed, ipso facto, that the government should meet the cost of administering examinations.

The argument ended many years of parents – in public and private schools – meeting the cost of national examinations fees at the basic education level.

The other aspect of education Kilonzo fought against was holiday tuition. Simply put, holiday tuition refers to educational programmes or tutoring sessions offered during school holidays.

A few weeks before the April school holiday in 2012, the minister announced at a public function well outside Nairobi that all schools, without exception, should allow learners to proceed on break.

At the time, some primary and secondary schools had established a tradition to retain or recall learners in the upper classes – Standard Eight and Form Four – a week or so earlier to attend holiday tuition.

This meant that learners remained at school for an additional one or two weeks, and parents paid for these lessons.

Mutula said nothing of the sort would happen. Some heads of schools thought the minister was playing politics, only for him to crack down on those schools that ignored the directive.

KNUT and KUPPET officials opposed the minister’s ban on holiday tuition, saying it helped slow learners to catch up with the rest of the students.

Kilonzo dismissed the argument as false, stating that children could not learn endlessly; that they needed to have time to relax and play; that they needed to join their families, particularly grandparents, to learn about things that formal education gave them.

The minister was clearly on solid ground. Authorities in educational systems across the world take certain factors into account when drawing up the school calendar. These include the interests of students, teachers and other stakeholders, curriculum load, quality of learning and maximising learning time.

The school calendar has two features: school days and holidays. Our school calendar provides a total of 39 weeks of school days. Education specialists I talked to said this is sufficient for teaching, learning and assessing learners.

The period was also ample enough, officials noted, for teachers to undertake professionally sound remedial teaching for students with learning difficulties. They discounted holiday tuition or any teaching outside the designated time, saying it amounted to robbing learners of time to grow and interact with other agencies of education.

I learned several lessons on leadership from the minister’s tenure of less than two years in the Ministry of Education.

The first was that a leader must bring the broadest thinking possible to the mandate of the sector he or she has been assigned to optimally serve its stakeholders. It was the broad thinking that enabled Kenya to see that assessing learners is intricately connected to the whole foundation of education. It should, for that reason, be as free as the provision of tuition to learners. There were cases where children whose parents couldn’t afford examination fees were unable to sit for the examinations.

Second, a leader must have the personal responsibility to not only find the problems an institution may have but also correct them. He should not wait for a problem to morph into a crisis before he takes action.

Third, a leader must track the implementation of decisions. Kilonzo had no sacred cows in his modus operandi. All schools, without exception, adhered to the ban when the owners discovered that the man was serious.

But my biggest lesson was that the authority of the office is bigger than the holder. All you need is the trust and support of career civil servants in the ministry who know the nuts and bolts of the institution. A minister can do so much that is of lasting value. He can do very little without them.

The writer is a Communication Consultant.

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