Report proposals offer best chance to reform the 8-4-4 system of education

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By STEPHEN DERWENT PARTINGTON 
Posted  Sunday, February 19  2012 at  18:54

Prof Douglas Odhiambo’s recent report proposing massive changes to the Kenyan education system is welcome, containing as it does much that is progressive and beneficial for learners, teachers, and the wider society alike.

The strengths of the Odhiambo report are various. For example, it promises at senior secondary level to enable pupils to develop their skills in various ways, branching as it will into technical, talent, general, and vocational institutions.

I am convinced that this channelling would avoid some of the pitfalls that selective systems have in the past suffered from.

For example, it would seem that under the new proposals the four alternative senior secondary routes will be considered different, but of equal value, perhaps avoiding the divisive social snobbery that presently places academic study on a pedestal and in effect ridicules those who enter the more technical fields — fields that require more esteem than has been accorded them in the past.

Another strength of the Odhiambo proposals is that unlike the present system, which has sieving terminal examinations at Standard Eight and Form Four, pupils’ progression will be determined in less drastic fashion by considering their cumulative performance in smaller, less pressurised “tests” that they will encounter at every stage of the primary and secondary process.

Again, this adds a certain fairness to the system.

However, the nature of these numerous exams will also need to be taken into consideration.

If, like now, they simply test crammable knowledge rather than understanding and skills, we will have to ask whether having more is really of any benefit.

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To test whether a junior secondary pupil should subsequently go to a talent senior secondary rather than a vocational senior secondary cannot realistically be determined by examinations that test only formal knowledge, especially since a side effect of such traditional examining would be to yet again privilege academic study over more practical learning, potentially stigmatising vocational-technical students and schools in the process.

These numerous examinations will have, then, to test a range of skills, technical and academic.

Probably, where it is possible to ensure that it has been taught professionally and completed fairly by teachers and pupils, the primary and secondary levels in any new system should also consider the possibility of assessment through coursework/projectwork rather than simple terminal examinations.

This would be especially valuable at senior secondary level, so that those entering tertiary education will already have those independent study skills that are required for, say, the writing of university term papers.

Coursework/projectwork, of course, also prepares school leavers for the demands of the modern workplace, and employers as well as universities across the globe value the “real world” skills that coursework gives a pupil.

The only grave weakness in the Odhiambo Report is the proposed shift to a September start to the academic year. As far as I am concerned, this would be disastrous, and if it occurred would arguably be a deeply selfish move by the university sector.

Much of the Southern Hemisphere already follows the January year that our primary and secondary schools presently follow, and our universities’ September year is a (Northern Hemisphere/British) colonial relic that stems from the Kenya-irrelevant fact that in the UK, the annual crop harvest occurs in August, meaning a traditionally long August holiday in Britain rather than a long December holiday.

Arguably, even in the post-agrarian UK, the September start to the academic year is a dated irrelevance, and plans are regularly raised to scrap it.

My second criticism stems from issues of scale: why cause massive disruption for many hundreds of thousands of school-level pupils, parents, and teachers when you could instead limit the year-shift disruption to a few thousand university-level students and lecturers by shifting their year to January from September?

If we really want a complete overhaul of the 8-4-4 system, I can think of few suggestions better than those offered to us by Prof Odhiambo.

Mr Partington is a secondary school head teacher. stepartington@yahoo.co.uk