Review of the Planning and Implementation of Free Primary Education in Malawi • 169
well as continue their training on the job. The large number of teachers that needed orientation in a short time required an equally large number of trainers, but they were not available in sufficient numbers. To fill the gap, secondary school teachers in addition to primary teacher college tutors were employed to conduct the training. Thus, there were concerns about the quality of teachers who had been oriented in such a haphazard manner. The initial plan was to continue teacher training during the school year through school-based supervision and professional support. However, as necessary structures and systems were not in place, this was not possible. A teacher development symposium for the Malawi Integrated In-service Teacher Education Programme (MIITEP) was held little over a year after FPE was implemented, in January 1996. An emergency teacher-training program to address the crisis was eventually developed. MIITEP was essentially a mixed-mode training program consisting of college-based and distance school–based training, replacing the preexisting conventional full-time preservice college-based training. The actual training of teachers started a year later in 1997. However, as has been observed, the early phases of the program faced a number of serious setbacks. The problems sprang largely from the absence of an absorptive capacity within the sector to handle a large-scale and complex program, thus affecting the quality of teachers (MoESC and UNICEF 1998; Kunje, Lewin, and Stuart 2003). The MIITEP assumed the existence of certain supportive mechanisms in the schools, for example, that head teachers and senior teachers would supervise and mentor the recruits in the schools. However, these teachers did not necessarily have supervision and mentorship skills, and in some schools, trained teachers who could provide that support were greatly outnumbered by untrained teachers. Alternatively, some schools were staffed entirely by untrained teachers so that it was impossible to realize the objective of school-based training. To impart these skills, the Malawi School Systems Support Program (MSSSP) was established in 1997, one year after the MIITEP was launched and after the training had already begun and untrained teachers had been in schools for almost four years. If there had been better planning for FPE, the MSSSP should have preceded MIITEP. Most aspects that were critical to the effective implementation of FPE were initiated and carried out after FPE was introduced. The sudden influx of pupils into the system led to what Avenstrup, Liang, and Nellemann (2004) have termed “access shock,” as the massive enrollment increases resulted in overcrowded classrooms and acute shortages of teachers and of teaching and learning materials. As shown later, the resource requirements for FPE implementation were enormous, and it