A latest Uwezo Kenya Sixth Learning Assessment Report has revealed that 30 out of 100 Class 3 pupils can do Class 2 work, while 8 out of 100 pupils in Class 8 cannot.
In its sixth year of assessing children’s basic literacy and numeracy skills, Twaweza East Africa researcher and Programmes Officer Victor Rateng' said Uwezo continues to find that children are not learning as they should.
The report highlights some critical issues in terms of teacher distribution, indicating that the teacher-to-classroom (stream) ratio is low.
On average, there were 12 teachers for every school with 10 classrooms (streams during the survey, with the ratio declining when only Teachers Service Commission (TSC) teachers are accounted for, to 11 TSC teachers for every school with 10 classrooms.
According to the report, Counties with the best (TSC teachers) to classroom ratio Kirinyaga, Kiambu, Embu, Nakuru, Nairobi, Kisii and Baringo, while Mandera and Garissa are the Counties with the worst (TSC teachers) to classroom ratio- (which have 6 teachers for 10 classrooms).
On average, 12 out of 100 teachers were absent from school on the day of the visit, which is worse than it was reported in 2014 where there were 9 out of 100 teachers absent on the day of visit, by the researchers.
The Uwezo data also highlights challenges in regards to the implementation of policies around early childhood education which revealed that only 4 out of 10 pre-primary teachers are trained.
3 out of 10 children are in primary school at the wrong age; 13 percent are aged 2-3 years while 21 percent are aged 6 or over.
Half (46 per cent) of pre-primary teachers are hired by County governments despite the lack of a clear policy on who is responsible for hiring such teachers.
The findings, are from the sixth national learning assessment conducted between October and November 2015, which interviewed over 130,000 children, aged 6 to 16, from all the 47 counties in the country.
Data were collected from more than 4,500 schools and 69,000 households.
The report, Are Our Children Learning?, examines three interconnected challenges in education: learning outcomes and what drives them, teachers and access to pre-primary, and primary education.