Assessment of quality of public day secondary schools in Kitui south constituency of Kitui county, Kenya

Abstract

The research problem addressed in this study was that, despite the government's realisation of the need for quality secondary education for all Kenyan children, the continued unsupervised expansion of day secondary schools is likely to negate the vision. The purpose of this study was therefore to establish the quality of public day secondary schools in Kitui South Constituency of Kitui County, Kenya. The objective of this study was to establish whether the public day secondary schools have the minimum physical facilities, are well resourced and staffed with teachers with relevant qualification. The study adopted social constructivism theory of learning. A conceptual framework for understanding education quality from UNESCO was adapted for the study. Literature was reviewed on school-bsased factors that determine education quality. Kitui South Constituency has 20 public day secondary school which were established from 2003 onwards. The study used descriptive research design to collect data from a population of 20 principals, 88 teachers and 3,016 students in public day secondary schools. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 10 (50%) principals, 40 (45%) teachers and 500 (17%) students. The research instruments were tested and found to be reliable with a Split-Half coefficient of 0.90, 0.83 and 0.80 for principals', teachers' and students' questionnaires respectively. The research instruments were then administered to all the sampled schools, and the data cleaned, coded and then subjected to the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 21 for analysis. The statistics used were frequency counts, means and percentages. The analysed data were presented using frequency distribution tables, pie charts and bar graphs. The study found out that majority of day public secondary schools lacked basic physical facilities such as classrooms (20%), offices and staffrooms (50%), science laboratory (80%), library (100%) and students' desks (80%). Majority of the schools were also found to have inadequate laboratory apparatus and chemicals (60%), reference textbooks (55%) and high textbook ratio of over two students per copy of textbook (90%). The study further showed that 50% of the schools did not have adequate number of teachers, while 55% of the available teachers had secondary school certificate as their highest academic attainment and 44.3% did not have teacher training qualification. Teachers were also found to use teaching strategies which are not leaner-centred, with more than 70% of them not covering syllabus. The study therefore concluded that public day secondary schools in Kitui South Constituency offer low quality education and as such, they are of low quality. The researcher recommends that the Government increase infrastructure funds to schools and allocate more funds to Teachers Service Commission for employment of more teachers. The researcher also recommends that the Government organises capacity building programmes for all teachers, as well as strengthening quality assurance services in public day secondary Schools in Kitui South Constituency with a view of improving curriculum implementation.