Understanding Local Realities of Quality Education in Kenya: Pupil, Parent and Teacher Perspectives
Abstract
In 2003, UNICEF-Kenya and the Kenyan Ministry of Education introduced the ‘Child Friendly Schools' initiative to encourage educational policy makers and practitioners to look for alternative ways to measure the quality of primary schools beyond pupils' test scores. In 2009, Kenyan government officials distributed the Child Friendly Schools Monitoring Toolkit (CMT) across all public primary schools, promoting it as an exercise in school self-evaluation for measuring educational quality. Senior education officials developed the CMT with 50 indicators for local stakeholders' use when measuring a school's level of child-friendliness. This study investigates the relevance of these 50 indicators to local perspectives of quality education. The study's findings suggest that the CMT's 50 indicators represent only 68% of what pupils, parents and teachers describe as factors that negatively or positively contribute to levels of child-friendliness in their schools. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach for data analysis, 33 ‘new’ indicators for child-friendliness emerge from the participants' responses. The study compares and synthesizes these new categories with the 50 original CMT indicators by creating an ‘Enhanced Child Friendly Schools Monitoring Toolkit’ (ECMT) for implementation in Kenyan primary schools. The revised ECMT indicators appear to capture 93% of what pupils, parents and teachers describe as factors influencing a school's level of child-friendliness. In the end, the study's findings call for a renewed dialogue between top-down and bottom-up perspectives of quality education in determining future criteria for measuring the levels of child-friendliness across Kenyan public primary schools.
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Biographies
ANDREW CUNNINGHAM is a Marshall Scholar pursuing his doctorate in comparative international education at at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. Prior to his research affiliation with UNICEF-Kenya and the Department of Education at the University of Oxford, Andrew lived and worked in rural Muhuru Bay, Kenya for two years as a co-founder and inaugural executive director of an all girls' secondary boarding school and community centre for development. His commitment to understanding the nuances of realizing ‘quality education for all’ stems from his variety of experiences working with and for disadvantaged youth throughout the world. Specifically, his research interests stem from his volunteer work as a Robertson Scholar serving as a teacher for inner-city youth in New Orleans with the Breakthrough Collaborative, volunteering with Mother Teresa's nuns at a school for street children in Calcutta, and serving as a Truman Scholar Fellow at the Chancellor's Office of DC Public Schools with Michelle Rhee. Andrew has also served as an educational consultant for projects in Tanzania, Cameroon, Kenya, Jamaica and China. His current research interests involve issues of social accountability through mobile phone-based school self-evaluation exercises in Kenyan public primary schools.
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