Members of Parliament have asked the Ministry of Education to reverse the closure of the boarding sections of 348 primary schools saying the move risks inconveniencing parents and teachers.
The lawmakers noted that most schools were never given time to comply with some of the requirements by the ministry while others were never inspected by officials from the ministry of education.
Majority Whip Silvanus Osoro who raised the matter said the decision was made out of panic following the tragic incident at Endarasha primary school.
“The ministries sent their officials to various boarding schools for inspection, they gave some schools three months but never went back to check for compliance,” Mr Osoro said.
“Looking at the education challenges we are facing such as the Competency Based Curriculum, classes for grade 9 and the current economic challenges that most parents are grappling with hence the ministry should save parents from the headache of finding a school next year.
“You cannot tell a parent who lives in Nairobi and his children in Nyeri that they will now be day scholars,” Mr Osoro said.
Dadaab MP Farah Maalim pointed out that in his constituency, there was no inspection done yet two important schools that serve pastoralists were closed.
“The whole idea of having a boarding school in a pastoralist area is to have children in school during the parents’ movement,” Mr Maalim said.
“They have closed down the schools in my constituency, the schools are compliant, and nobody knows where they got the information,” he added.
He termed the move by the ministry as an education catastrophe that risks locking out many children especially from the pastoralist out of school.
“We put up these boarding schools so that they can be able to access education. This must be reversed immediately because that is the only way our children can access education,” Mr Maalim said.
Kitui Central MP Makali Mulu said the timing on the closure of the schools was wrong saying most of the schools closed are publicly supported by the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) which had already drawn its budget for this financial year.
“We want to appeal to the ministry to suspend this decision so that we can be able to factor these in our budget for improvement,” Dr Mulu said.
Speaker of the National Assembly Moses Wetang’ula directed the chairman of the education committee Julius Melly to bring a statement on Thursday afternoon with details of the reasons why the schools were closed.
That issue is very important, the chair should bring a statement with cogent reasons why the ministry closed so many schools and the mitigation it has put in place on the inconvenience caused to parents and pupils over the issues,” speaker Wetang’ula said.
On Monday, the ministry ordered immediate closure of boarding sections in 348 primary schools across the country for failure to meet safety and compliance standards.
The move followed an extensive assessment conducted in September and October 2024 to evaluate the adherence of these institutions to Safety Standards for Basic Education Institutions.
In a circular dated November 27, 2024, Education Principal Secretary Belio Kipsang revealed that the schools in question were found to have grossly violated key safety provisions.
The ministry has as a result instructed regional, county, and sub-county directors of education to enforce the closure of the boarding section in these primary schools with immediate effect.
