Background
In 2003, Kenya adopted the Free Primary Education Policy to abolish school fees for all children in primary schools, in an effort to realize Universal Primary Education and attain the Education for All goals. As a result, all fees were waived in public primary schools. This created a major influx of children, which has strained the system. Common conditions include a lack of learning resources and classes not being taught effectively. Despite a national average class size of 45 to 50, in some areas classes have well over 100 students. At the same time, in sparsely populated areas, especially in the Northeast, and among nomadic populations, classes may be very small, with children of widely different ages being taught by the same teacher. Primary Teacher Training College (PTTC) tutors have long been recruited from secondary school teachers to teach in PTTCs without having a structured induction program; they are often not well prepared for their jobs. They also generally lack adult training methods and knowledge in both the content and pedagogy that is appropriate for primary schools, and they may not be familiar with the challenges that teachers face in classrooms.
The TEPD project was initiated in 2007 with the same goal as USAID’s Strategic Objective 8, Intermediate Result 2: to improve the practices and competencies of teachers in Kenya. The project was designed to harmonize with and support the five-year Kenya Education Sector Support Program, one emphasis of which was to improve the quality of preservice teacher education. At that time, more than 45,000 past graduates of PTTCs were without teaching jobs, so the TEPD project proposed ways to provide new services and materials for employed teachers. Further, with a new national constitution and various new education legislation, USAID characterized the context of the education sector as one of “rapid reforms.” This has placed demands on the project from the start until today.
The project initially had four objectives. Soon after the original cooperative agreement was signed, additional PEPFAR funding was made available so an HIV/AIDS education component could be added. In the first year the five objectives were renamed “Elements” and these were reordered as follows:
- To establish a framework for enhancing teacher competencies within a rapid reforms context
- Improve the skills of PTTC Lecturers by introducing new and existing teacher education materials that better prepare student teachers for actual school conditions
- Improve skills of PTTC Lecturers through a national lecturer induction and training program
- Improve skills of PTTC Lecturers and build capacity of PTTCs to use ICT for preservice teacher education/Accelerating a 21st Century Education by preparing teachers in 23 schools and teacher trainees at the PTTCs and DTTCs to integrate the use of technology in classrooms, in partnership with Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, USAID and the Government of Kenya
- Initiate skills-based training relevant to HIV/AIDS in preservice teacher training programs
OUTPUTS
- Policy formulation
- Modernized teacher training institutions TTCs
- Teacher Competencies
- Quality of management in TTCs enhanced.
- Enhanced financial stability of TTCs
- Program Implementation team(PIT) and program implementation system (PIS) established, installed and in operation
- Monitoring and Evaluation
DURATION: This was done in march 2013