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Below 50% complete primary school

  • Majority leave without competency skills
  • Per pupil expenditure still low

Over half of pupils who enrol in Standard One fail to complete the full cycle of primary education in the country, a 2015 government report and other studies on the same have shown.

Full of enthusiasm, but more than half of them  could fail to reach Standard 8
Full of enthusiasm, but more than half of them could fail to reach Standard 8

This means a large group of children in the country are leaving school before they have acquired basic competency skills.

Further, the reports also show a meagre 36 percent reach secondary school—to mean, at least seven in 10 primary school pupils fail to make it to secondary education.

Experts have since warned that the pattern shows that Malawi’s school system is producing large numbers of illiterate to semi-illiterate individuals who cannot meaningfully contribute to economic development.

Others fear that low completion and transition rates can also demotivate children, especially girls from continuing with education, further complicating the problem of drop outs.

But spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST), Manfred Ndovie, while accepting that under-completion is indeed a big challenge, said Malawians should not despair because interventions are in place to turn the tables.

Crowded classrooms make learning difficult
Crowded classrooms make learning difficult

Government’s own 2015 Education Information Management Systems (Emis) report reveals that completion rate—just like in the 2009 report—is at 51 percent which is a drop from 52 percent that was in the 2013 report.

However, in the past two decades, Malawi has been enrolling an average of one million pupils in Standard One. There were 1 061 868 pupils that enrolled in Standard One in 2015.

In the same year, however—just to give the picture of the scale of completion crisis—only 249 031 candidates sat the 2015 Primary School Leaving Certificate of Education (PSLCE) examinations.

Or consider this year’s PSLCE results. Out of an average one million pupils that entered Standard One eight years ago, only 255 087 sat for 2016 PSLCE.

Agreeing with the 2015 Emis, Chancellor College lecturer in education, Esmie Kadzamira, says Malawi has made little progress in ensuring that all children that enter school complete the primary education cycle.

Low completion has been a persistent problem of primary education since the introduction of formal education by the missionaries and the problem has continued to plague the primary education even with the coming of free primary education (FPE) in 1994, she said.

She underlined that her analysis of primary completion rates between 1972 and 2013 suggest that less than 30 percent of Standard One entrants complete a full cycle of primary education.

For instance, when FPE was introduced in 1994, over one million pupils enrolled in Standard One.  Eight years later, in 2002, the Emis reported that the last two classes—Standards Seven and Eight—had less than 200 000 pupils.

According to Kadzamira, such a pattern of school participation is referred to as chronic under-completion, a situation where large cohorts of entrants into the school system do not complete the full cycle of education and this becomes an established pattern of participation over long periods of time.

Her worst worry is that the majority of non-completers leave school before they have acquired basic competences to enable them to meaningfully participate in the economic development of the country.

The highest drop outs, she added, are between the first two grades—Standards One and Two. This suggests that initial enrolment is not sustained through the last grade, she said.

This has created what Kadzamira calls ‘education concentration camps’ in the first two grades.

“This is a situation where the learning environment is hardly conducive for effective teaching and learning and creating problems of extreme overcrowding, little learning, low attainment that have a spill over to the rest of the education system,” she explained.

Meanwhile, education scholars and analysts are raising an alarm for immediate redress of the trend.

Zambia-based education analyst Limbani Nsapato notes that completion and transition rates are key indicators of quality of the education system.

“We should be worried because the low efficiency status shows that the quality of our education system is not satisfactory,” he said.

Unless we pull up our socks, he added, and ensure higher enrolment and transition rates, we cannot hope to achieve the high quality of education as per national and international policy benchmarks.

“Furthermore, it shows that a lot of resources are wasted in the system, which is a big concern as far as sustainability of our system is concerned given that we have perennial shortages of financial, human and material resources which should be put to maximum use rather than being wasted,” he explained.

Steve Sharra, who teaches at Catholic University of Malawi (Cunima), fears that  the country cannot develop with so many young people failing to obtain a meaningful education.

Despite such a worrying trend, government has been working to ensure it meets local and international benchmarks of funding the education sector. Currently, 23 percent of the national budget goes to the education sector. Further, 49 percent of the education budget goes to primary education.

So, why, despite all such investments, are primary schools failing to help children complete their education?

Sharra and Nsapato argue that though primary education sector gets the lion’s share of the education budget, the allocations to primary education are still below standards.

While agreeing with the two, Ndovie feels that other factors—for instance, culture and parental motivation—play a larger role in deciding education outcomes.

“We still have more girls, because of harmful cultural practices, getting married or being married off at a very young age. We still have parents dropping their children from school to help them in domestic work. To mean, we have a situation where government commits resources where there are no learners,” he said.

Nsapato underlines that Malawi’s annual per pupil expenditure is still below the continental average of $136 and far below the nearly $400 required to offer quality education.

“It is for this reason that we find that there is acute shortage of teaching and learning materials and teachers which are critical for quality education,” he said.

Sharra, on the other hand, argues that despite the largest budgetary share that primary education gets, not all of it gets to the school and the child.

“As we learnt earlier this year, significant amounts get diverted to other areas for various reasons, some of them political.

“Yet we still have very large classes, disgruntled teachers who are owed arrears, leave grants, promotions, among other grievances,” he said.

Going forward, though, Sharra wants more investments in teacher training and retention and Nsapato wants investments in early child development (ECD), while Kadzamira argues that government needs to accept that Malawi’s education is in crisis and requires a complete overhaul.

She wants greater attention to be put in early grades, at least in the short term, while at the same time not neglecting the other grades.

However, Ndovie, said government, every year, is recruiting 10 500 teachers to reduce the current high teacher-pupil ratio. Globally, pupil-teacher ratio is supposed to be 1:50. In Malawi it rises to 1:110. n

 

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