It’s perturbing to note that even in the 21st-century poverty and inadequate learning resources are the key challenges facing learning in primary schools. Rendering to Uwezo findings, 16% pupils aged 7 years and under in the North-Eastern Kenya could not even execute the simplest task of reading letters!
And countrywide, school attendance and progress is a big problem to children from humble backgrounds.
This educational phenomenon explains why children in the urban setup and those from well-to-do households perform way much better in the KCPE examinations. Much hasn’t been done to curb the problem and the situation is seeming to get out of hand.
Uwezo reports that 39% of pupils aged 7 and 13 years are unable to read a class 2 story whereas in 2011, 3 years back, the problem was at 40%. This demands for better mitigation measures that will reduce the problem at a contented haste, bearing in mind that education is the heart to a bright prospect for the pupils.
The effects these problems pose on the pupils are beyond imagination. The major effect being that the KCPE results are used to indicate the extent to which pupils have acquired numeracy, literacy and practical skills in readiness for higher education.
A failure in such examinations means that the pupil cannot access higher education, and if this happens then the academic future of the pupil is ruined and so is their hope.
By Davis.