Why Kenyan child must be brought back into the boardroom

Kenya has won the argument about getting children into school. We are still losing the one about whether they learn.

Sit at the back of a Grade 4 classroom almost anywhere in this country and try a simple exercise. Ask the children, one by one, to read a short story written for Grade 3. Six of every ten will not manage it with understanding.

That figure comes from the second national Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Assessment, published this year. Set it beside another: 94 per cent of Kenyan children aged four to seventeen are enrolled in school. We built the classrooms. We filled them. And yet by Grade 9, nine years later, nearly three in ten learners still cannot read a Grade 3 story or solve a Grade 3 sum.

For a parent, that arithmetic is brutal. It means nine years of levies, uniforms, transport and early mornings spent on a child who leaves the system without the one skill everything else depends on. For the country, it means we are financing attendance and calling it education.

In August I travelled with a Kenyan delegation to India as part of the Lighthouse Initiative, a peer exchange between countries attempting foundational learning reform at national scale. India was the second stop; the first, a year earlier, was Sobral in Brazil.

India educates roughly 250 million schoolchildren and has spent five years on a single national mission, NIPUN Bharat, to ensure every child can read with understanding and handle basic arithmetic by the end of Grade 3.

What struck me was not the scale. It was how unremarkable the fixes were.

Take the middle tier, the officers who sit between the ministry and the classroom. In Kenya, Curriculum Support Officers are meant to be the teacher's professional companion.

In practice they are buried in administrative duties and an expanding policing role, covering zones too large and too scattered to reach, often without the fuel money to reach them.

In the districts we visited in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, the equivalent officers do exactly one thing: pedagogy. They hold no budgets.

They conduct no inspections. Each school receives one visit a month, and the visit runs to a fixed 120 minutes, forty minutes observing a lesson, twenty assessing children picked at random, forty giving the teacher feedback in private, twenty planning with the head teacher.

The monthly spacing is deliberate; a teacher needs room to practise before being watched again. So is the three-year term, after which mentors return to their own classrooms, which stops an elite administrative cadre from forming.

Then the calendar. In Haryana, the school year does not open on page one of the textbook. April and May are given over to remediation, securing the previous grade's benchmarks so that every child can follow what comes next. New content begins in July, once teachers are satisfied the gaps are closed.

Textbook, teacher's guide and test are deliberately built to speak to one another, so that what is taught, what is supported and what is examined are the same thing. In Kenya we open on page one in January, and the child who arrives behind is further behind by February.

And the culture. Across the states we visited, schools have been consciously designed as places children want to be — safe, welcoming, noisy with laughter. "Learning will happen in places of happy children," one teacher-development director told us. This is not sentimentality. In the early grades a child's engagement is not a nice-to-have; it is the precondition for everything that follows.

None of this asks Kenya to import an Indian model. It asks for four decisions we are perfectly capable of making ourselves.

First, free the middle tier to teach. Build a dedicated movement and facilitation budget for Curriculum Support Officers into the Teachers Service Commission's estimates, revive school-based teacher support and zonal cluster learning sessions, and deploy sub-county quality assurance officers to support classroom observation rather than duplicate paperwork.

Second, stop promoting our best teachers out of the classroom. Elevating an outstanding teacher to head of institution on seniority alone produces a double loss: a weakened classroom and an unprepared administrator.

Both Brazil and India qualify school leaders on demonstrated pedagogical and managerial competence.

Kenya should professionalise school leadership on the same basis and require heads to routinely observe and support early-grade lessons.

Third, thin the lower-primary load. A six-year-old still learning to decode words cannot carry nine learning areas at once.

Reading, writing and number should command the timetable in Grades 1 to 3. The rest can wait a year and will be better learnt for the waiting.

Fourth, make remediation policy rather than goodwill. Finalise the national Foundational Learning Guidelines and write structured catch-up periods into the school calendar, so that a teacher who slows down to close a gap is doing her job rather than falling behind the scheme of work.

The evidence for all four already exists, and much of it is Kenyan. Work in Bungoma has shown that children's errors in early mathematics are patterned and diagnosable: shown the pattern, a teacher can correct it.

Through Napenda Kusoma, teachers in 60 schools across five counties have built and used their own classroom assessments with technical support from KNEC and KICD, reaching more than 5,000 learners.

With the Ministry of Education's Directorate of Quality Assurance and Standards, we supported the first Annual National Report on Education Quality, drawing on quality assurance officers across all 47 counties. What Kenya lacks is not evidence. It is the decision to act on it.

The most useful thing said during the entire immersion was said by a Kenyan. Deadlocked in a discussion about national and county mandates, the kind of standoff that stalls education decisions for years, a senior member of our delegation cut through it: let us be driven by a moral obligation to the child, and every time national and county mandates collide, bring the child into the boardroom.

She cannot attend the budget meeting where her teacher's monthly support visit is struck out for want of fuel money. Somebody has to carry her in.

The writer leads Ecosystem Building and Government Engagement at Mizizi Elimu Afrika.