Executive Summary
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The lack of connection between available resources and results in the different schools shows that there is a serious pedagogical management problem. In primary education, schools with the same expenditure per student (MK4,000 for example) show PSLE results that vary from less than 10 to 100 percent. Similarly, in junior secondary education, schools with a unit expenditure of around MK10,000 have Junior Certificate Examination (JCE) pass rates ranging from 15 to 100 percent. The education system is suffering from serious problems of pedagogical management insofar as some schools with higher than average expenditures show poorer results. These observations raise questions about the process underlying the way resources are transformed into learning achievement at the school level. Beyond their allocation, the way resources are used seems to be a major factor influencing the level of learning outcome. Improving supervision, transparency, and accountability mechanisms at the local level are known to be effective interventions. Considerable disparities in access exist and they increase along with the level of education. A family’s standard of living is the greatest factor in discrimination. Schooling patterns suffer from disparities according to gender. Gender parity indexes decrease from 1.04 (that is, a better enrollment for girls than for boys) in the first four standards to 0.50 in higher education and 0.38 in TEVET. Access to each level of education suffers even more from location and income disparities. The difference in the primary completion rate is 14 percent between boys and girls, yet 34 percent between urban and rural students. And the disparity is still greater—44 percent—between the richest 20 percent of the population and the poorest 20 percent (see figure 5). Furthermore, university students from the poorest quintile make up only 0.7 percent of students, while the richest quintile accounts for 91 percent. Figure 5: Access Rates to the Different Grades According to Wealth Index 100
98% 1st quintile 2nd quintile 3rd quintile 4th quintile 5th quintile
94% 80
Percent
67% 59%
60
53% 39%
40
31%
20
23% 9%
0 Access to primary
Primary completion
Sources: Calculation from MICS 2006.
Access to lower secondary
8% Lower secondary completion
5% Access to upper secondary
2% Upper secondary completion