Testing Testing (Grade) 1, 2, 3: Assessing the Crisis of Quality Education in Kenya Amid COVID-19

Abstract

The Coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the education sector, and posed insurmountable challenges to achieving quality education. Learning has been impeded, causing regression in knowledge and skills, and learners remain excluded from the attendant social, safety and security benefits associated with school attendance. Equally, social and physical distancing regulations have inspired new education innovations, and stakeholders have come up with adaptive and innovation solutions to ensure that learning continues. This paper aims to assess the status of education in Kenya, and the implications of the pandemic on access, equity and quality of education. It draws on desktop and online research including legal research and analysis of case law, statutes and journal articles, to investigate quality standards in education in Kenya. The legal and policy analysis undertaken by this paper is instructive, and can provide valuable pointers to stakeholders seeking to implement quality assurance in education.This paper finds that in response to the pandemic, the government is seeking to leverage and expand on the its Digital Literacy Programme for basic education, and that higher education institutions are expanding open, distance and electronic learning in order to remain relevant, accessible and globally competitive amid the global public health crisis and the internationalization and globalization university education. As learning shifts to incorporate emerging learning technologies such as online or digital learning and low-technology solutions such as broadcast learning, members of vulnerable groups including persons differently-abled continue to face exclusion from access to education. The 2019 Census finds that only an estimated 47.3 per cent of Kenyans have access to mobile phones, and 10 percent have access to computer technology. Additionally, internet penetration rates are at a record low of 22 per cent. Kenya has adequate legal frameworks and human rights standards of protection of the right to education, and to equitable access of relevant, quality education. However, poor governance structures including weak implementation of policies, laws and accountability frameworks are threatening access, equity and quality education in Kenya. This paper suggests that adequate funding of education and with particular emphasis and priority to the needs of members of vulnerable groups, backed with political good, can help to advance national goals and aspirations of equity, inclusion and non-discrimination in all spheres of life, and especially in education.