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"id": 213736,
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"speaker_name": "Dr. Rutto",
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"legal_name": "Sammy Kipkemoi Rutto",
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"content": "Thank you, Mr. Temporary Deputy Sir, for giving me this chance to contribute to this Motion. First of all, it is commendable that the Government raised the expenditure on education by 11 per cent, as the Minister for Finance mentioned during his Budget Speech. In distributing the specific allocations for the Ministry of Education, the Minister gave Kshs8.1 billion to free primary education. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, I would like to point out the following areas that the Minister, in his allocation of resources, seems to have forgotten. One area that has consistently been mentioned is the early childhood development. In the policy document - the National Action Plan on Education for All - and Sessional Paper No.1 of 2005, the Government has stated specific policy measures that it intends to take with respect to early childhood education. One of them is the harmonisation of the curriculum. The other one is to make early childhood education an integral part of the entire education system in this country. The other policy statement is about the development of terms of service for teachers in that sector. As you read the Budget and listen to the Minister, he is completely silent on matters that were stated in the policy paper. I want to state that early childhood education is an important element of our educational process. It lays the foundation for a child to develop all the way to become a professor that the Minister for Education is. If we do not take into account the serious development of early childhood education, then we would be missing a point on that matter. The other area that I would like to comment on is the secondary school education. Currently, while there are a lot of efforts being made by the Ministry of Education to improve the quality of secondary and primary school education, I would like to say that a lot of attention has, indeed, been paid to primary education, although the quality of education is still very low. That is simply because the quality assurance department is still very weak. The Minister has told us that they have employed 240 members of staff in the quality assurance department. But I want to observe that those are very few considering that checking quality at the grassroots level is, indeed, a very hectic task. While the Ministry is trying to train high level quality assurance inspectors, I would like to say that it should encourage internal training within institutions. That may, in fact, help to improve checking of quality assurance within the schools themselves. The traditional habit of taking teachers out of classrooms and promoting them to inspectors needs to be revisited. They should try to improve quality by using internal mechanisms that can be built in the institutions themselves. I expect the Minister to encourage creativity in terms of ensuring that quality education is offered in our schools. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, there is a lot of expansion in secondary schools. My colleagues and the Minister himself mentioned that there are several schools that have been built through the Constituencies Development Fund (CDF). Some of the problems we are experiencing are largely to do with the shortage and distribution of teachers. I had hoped that the Minister for Education would tell us exactly how he intends to distribute teachers fairly and improve our educational management. The other area concerns quality in the university sector. We have raised questions concerning quality assurance in universities over and over again. The Ministry has promised this House continuously that it intends to strengthen the Commission for Higher Education. We expected an equivalent measure of funding and, perhaps, legislation to improve the Commission for Higher Education. There is mushrooming of private universities which purport to offer higher education. But very many of them are not properly checked. I expected the Minister for Education to give us direction in that area, to improve and check quality assurance in the university education sector. But I noted, while looking at the funding for universities, that most of the money is going to recurrent expenditure. We have asked the Ministry of Education, over and over again, to enhance July 17, 2007 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 2537 funding for research activities in our universities. Our universities are supposed to be production centres for knowledge and not consumption centres only. The tradition that we have developed over time, is to make our universities consumption centres for knowledge. Indeed, universities should be producing knowledge. One of the areas that need to strengthened, so that those institutions can be able to produce knowledge is to fund research programmes. We expect the Ministry of Education to set aside substantial amounts of money for research, if they take that undertaking seriously. We also expect them to stimulate universities to look for money for research. The trend that has been going on and on is that research funding is very little. The Ministry of Education, in its budget, should think about that very seriously. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, another area which I do not know if it falls under the docket of the Ministry of Education, but it is education all the same, is the adult education and life long education elements. Education is a life long process. We learn from childhood and all the way until we finally retire to our graves. Now, there should be some important effort that is put on the adult education sector. The policy document that I referred to earlier intimated that the Government would establish mobile adult literacy programmes. However, we are not seeing these programmes being developed in our villages. It also mentioned that the terms of service for the facilitators of adult education were to be priority for the NARC Government. Nothing or very little is happening in that direction. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, on special needs education, this is an area that requires specialised attention. While I agree that the Ministry of Education has made a lot of effort in trying to identify children with special needs and trying to train through the Kenya Institute of Education (KIE) staff that deals with children with special needs, children who are in these special needs institutions at the grassroots are experiencing a lot of problems. One of those problems is that there are very few trained teachers to deal with special needs children. You go to schools that have children whose brains are not very well developed and you notice that they do not have enough teachers. For example, I have three of them in my own constituency. One, is carrying out an integrated programme in the primary schools sector and it does not have sufficient teachers. The other one deals with deaf children. It also lacks sufficient teachers. I believe with that small sample from my constituency, every other special needs school in this Republic suffers the same. We expect the Ministry of Education to pay attention to these special needs programmes in our schools and support them. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, if you look at the budget of the Ministry of Education, the bulk of the money is going to be spent on Recurrent Expenditure. If you compare Recurrent Expenditure with Development Expenditure, Vote D31, you can see that the development budget is still very low. If you read through this year's budget, you will realise that what has been given to the development budget in the Ministry is very small. For example, the Minister for Finance has allocated Kshs250 million for the building of the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) building. He has also allocated another Kshs300 million for the construction of the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) headquarters. In fact, what has been stated as development budget for KIE in the document looks like recurrent because all the money that was supposed to be spent on development goes to payment of salaries, allowances and that kind of stuff. Although the Minister has said that he intends to improve KIE, I do not think he is doing much. We all know that KIE is a very important institution in this country. For education to be complete, it has to provide relevant curriculum that completely serves the intellectual needs of our children. The KIE that we have here is potentially capable of providing training for the rest of Africa, south of the Sahara. However, the budget that the Minister has given to that institution is very small. The development budget, in my opinion, should be increased. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, well, some of the money that, of course, has been allocated for development purposes, he has mentioned goes to the Kenya Education Sector Support 2538 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES July 17, 2007 Programme (KESSUP) where we have seen in our secondary and primary schools, the Ministry giving those schools some support for the development of physical facilities. That, indeed, is very commendable. However, when the KESSUP was formed, one of its objectives was to improve the in-service training, which I am not sure, has been done effectively. The other goal why KESSUP was introduced was to improve on capacity building. We have seen in some of the sectors or areas some capacity building being done, but it is not sufficient. It has not been done to the level that I believe will improve educational services. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker Sir, the other area which KESSUP was supposed to deal with was the education management information system which the Ministry is trying to grapple with. Information systems are very important for collecting and processing data that is necessary for making policy in education. I expected the Minister to inject a little bit of more money and serious attention in that respect. The development of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), for instance, is still wanting in our own institutions. Lastly, the Minister talked about the Education Act that is being written. I have read through that Act and there are many reservations that stakeholders in education have raised with respect to it. One of them is that it seeks to destroy the autonomy of various institutions. In other words, the Act anticipates to merge all acts that have created various educational institutions and in the process destroy their creativity and autonomy. While the Minister has allocated some money to the TSC which is an education institution that he intends to support, we would like to say that while writing the Education Act, the TSC should not be destroyed in the process. We would like to uphold the TSC. If you recall while writing the Bomas Draft, in fact, the TSC was going to be given a slot in the constitutional amendments like any other commission that was going to be established by law. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, another area which I do not know if it falls under the Ministry of Education is the provision of education, particularly dealing with the terms and conditions of service of teachers and so on. While we write the Act, I would like to request the Minister to pay attention to those areas that have been mentioned. I would like to thank the Minister for Finance, in particular for recognising the Ministry of Education and allocating it the money that is required. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would like to raise an issue concerning educational management. If you look at the Ministry of Education, you will see that it is run basically by people from one ethnic community. The management structure consists of people from one ethnic community. That is right from the Minister to the Permanent Secretary, all the way down. In educational management, we would like to diversify. That does not mean that---"
}