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{
    "id": 1237939,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1237939/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 256,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Shakeel Shabbir (",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "been in Parliament, and even when I was a mayor, I have been shocked and I am still shocked. When I was a mayor, I was shocked by the callous way stakeholders looked at the future of our education. Ten years ago, there was a proposal to bring laptops to our Standard One students. That was kneejerk and it died. A number of primary schools got computers that are sitting in stores. It was a mess. We spent billions of shillings on this project that was ill thought of. The CBC is a good idea, but the JSS is a bad idea. The issue is that you cannot have a junior secondary school in a primary school. Junior secondary was initially meant to be part and parcel of secondary school. At the moment, we have children in Standard Seven with different uniforms from Standard Eight. Who are senior? Is it the Standard Eight children or the Standard Seven children? We have secondary school teachers who have been posted to primary schools to teach junior secondary children. Who do they report to? Do they report to the primary school head teachers or to somebody else? What has happened? In the last Parliament, the last Government told us that it will construct 25,000 new classrooms and 25,000 new laboratories. Where are they? The former Minister for Education, the late Professor Magoha – may God rest his soul – was a very good and committed man. He went out of his way to build classrooms for JSS in secondary schools. I do not know what happened there after so that junior secondary schools were transferred to primary schools. If you go to your primary schools, students of junior secondary school have different uniforms and they are taught by secondary school teachers who have no idea who they are to report to. The curriculum is upside down. This proposal to develop a comprehensive JSS policy and have order in JSS is a good idea. However, it falls short in proposing a corrective action to be taken. Junior secondary schools should not – I repeat – should not be in primary schools. They must be in secondary schools. That is what we must do. It is easy to move junior secondary schools to secondary schools. We cannot have a primary school doubling up a junior secondary school with a primary school head teacher who has no idea what secondary school teaching is all about. What will happen next year when we have the second level of junior secondary school children? We have a big problem. There is no single laboratory in a primary school in Kenya. That does not make sense. We have done this. We have worked with the NG-CDF and we have built laboratories in secondary schools. Many secondary schools and primary schools are next to each other. It is about time the Ministry realises it made a huge mistake. It has cost parents lots of money to get different uniforms and desks. In my constituency, many children have been sent home because they do not have uniforms. A primary school head teacher is sending a junior secondary school student back home. Where does such a student belong? We have Form One students who have reported in secondary schools. Where does a junior secondary student fall? Ideally, he should be transiting to the secondary school system. As much as we want to have a policy and agree that we need to sort out this thing, it is a big mess. It is the same mess that was created by the laptop project."
}