Act fast to fix the underfunding of public education institutions

The downward spiral of funding of public educational institutions has been gradual and alarming and is now getting to a point that they are almost grinding to a halt due to inadequate funding.

Let us use the funding of basic education and universities sub sectors as examples. When the administration President Mwai Kibaki introduced free primary education and later secondary education the Ministry of Education provided capitation of Sh22,245 per secondary school student.

For a while this worked out well.

About seven years ago, the ministry instructed principals to set aside Sh5,000 out of this amount for infrastructure development.

This implied that each of the vote heads had to be reduced in order to raise this amount for infrastructure leading to the accumulation of debts on the underfunded vote heads.

One would have thought that the government would have provided an additional Sh5,000 to the capitation raising it to Sh27,245 to cater for infrastructure.

At the universities level, the reduction of students qualified to be admitted to universities from 2016 led to the collapse of module two intake and a near collapse of private universities was the beginning of the downward spiral in funding leading to the current accumulated debt of close to Sh70 billion in the public ones.  This has to be sorted out by the government.

Then the Competency Based Curriculum was introduced that requires much more teachers per school since it is technically oriented.

Furthermore, the secondary school component was elongated to six years, implying that, of necessity, more teachers are required. And then the decision to domicile Grades Seven to Nine in primary schools implied that more infrastructure has to be provided at that level.

The situation in basic education institutions is such that capitation to schools is received late and in inadequate amounts, infrastructure — especially for Grade Nine — is not available five months to January 2025, teachers are inadequate, especially for grades Seven to Nine, principals, especially in senior secondary schools are highly stressed because they are underfunded and are not allowed to charge extra levies in the schools.

The rejection of the Finance Bill, 2024 is further compounding the financial conundrum in schools.

This has resulted in the reduction of about Sh20 billion for capitation, the likely temporary suspension of medical cover for teachers, the delay in upgrading the terms of service for the 46,000 intern teachers to permanent and pensionable status and the delay in the recruitment of additional 20,000 intern teachers to meet the demand.

Furthermore, the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) will not be able to implement the third phase of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).

These challenges in addition to those obtaining in tertiary institutions are massive and cannot be wished away nor postponed since the students cannot be held in their current classes awaiting the improvement of the economy.

The just launched strategic plans for the ministry and the TSC have put in place policies and programmes for the promotion of education with the killer assumption that funds would be available to implement them.

No one neither foresaw the eruption of protests from the Gen Z age group nor imagined that the government budget would have to be re-configured well after the traditional budget deadlines.

Going forward, it will be necessary to raise additional funds for the sector.

Construction of roads, railways and power lines can wait but students have to be taught.

One other option is to upgrade Grade Nine students to join senior secondary schools as infrastructure and teachers are already available at that level leading to immense savings. There is still time to do so otherwise their pioneer three or so classes, with the concurrence of their parents, may grow up embittered that they were not catered well in their education in their formative years. They could become more aggressive than the Gen Z age group in raising their grievances.

Mr Sogomo is an education expert and former Secretary Teachers Service Commission, [email protected]. @Bsogomow