School Mergers and Deregistration Loom as Gov’t Targets Underperforming Institutions
The Ministry of Education has hinted at school mergers and deregistrations across the country after a verification exercise revealed severe under-enrollment and fraudulent practices in institutions.
Speaking to the Senate on Wednesday, Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba said the government is collecting data on enrollment and school status to inform a new policy on rationalizing schools.
“This will give us the basis to make a policy on whether some schools should remain registered or whether students should be moved to other schools so that we can achieve optimal balance between teacher numbers and student population,” Ogamba said.
According to the CS, some schools are registered with less than 10 students, making them unsustainable. He noted that in many cases, schools with single-digit enrollment have multiple teachers, straining education resources.
“Some of the schools we have are not viable. You can’t have a school with less than 10 students, maybe with 5 teachers and expect it to run optimally,” Ogamba explained.
The education boss also admitted that past registration processes allowed institutions to operate once they met the minimum requirements without ongoing audits to evaluate their long-term viability. The current verification exercise is meant to address that gap by providing updated statistics on enrollment and school conditions.
“We are interrogating the data to determine which schools will remain, which will be merged and which will be separated. We want our institutions to be efficient and well-resourced,” he said.
The verification process has also uncovered a bigger scandal in the sector with over 50,000 “ghost students” found in just half of the schools audited so far. Basic Education Principal Secretary Julius Bitok told MPs that most of the fraudulent enrollments were in secondary schools.
The revelation has raised concerns on misuse of public funds as government capitation is allocated based on student numbers. Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna estimated that the scheme may have cost taxpayers almost a billion shillings in a single year.
The ministry will release a detailed policy once the nationwide verification exercise is complete on which schools will be retained, merged or deregistered.
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School Mergers and Deregistration Loom as Gov’t Targets Underperforming Institutions