Expert: How public schools can improve performance

Dar es Salaam. To improve performance in public secondary schools, the government should stimulate competition by borrowing a leaf from the school voucher system, which has been applied successfully in other countries, an education stakeholder advised yesterday.

The Educational Initiative Tanzania (EIT) chief executive officer, Mr Benjamin Nkonya, said if parents or students opting for public schools were allowed to choose a school they want basing on the quality of education offered there, more schools would be motivated to perform better to attract students. He said this would create demand among the public schools and eventually create incentives for each school to produce better students and ensure availability of highly quality staff.

Mr Nkonya’s advice comes two days after the National Examination Council of Tanzania (Necta) announced the 2018 national form four examination results, which revealed a discrepancy in performance between private and public schools.

According to Necta, the private schools outperformed their public counterparts. Ten best performing schools and students were privately-owned while most public schools held bottom positions.

In private schools, Mr Nkonya noted, parents choose to take their students to schools, which provide quality education, but in public schools, the government posts students to schools regardless of the quality of education offered there.

In such circumstances, the students are not motivated perform well, teachers also lose motivation even though they continue receiving salaries.

Under the current education system in Tanzania, the government is both the major financier as well as the provider of education.

However, experts say schooling services still do not reach all members of the society equally.

Speaking to The Citizen, Mr Nkonya said the government can make public schools competitive among themselves by adopting the education voucher system, whereby the government issues funding through a voucher or certificate, for a student at a school chosen by the student or the student’s parent. “The money earned from these school vouchers can also be used by the schools to fund expenses such as salaries and administration cost,” said Mr Nkonya.

In private schools, he revealed, if parents realise that the school to which they sent their students was not performing well, the decision is normally to withdraw them from that school and transfer them to another school.

“This has created competition among private schools to create better learning environment so as to avoid losing students to other schools,” he said.

Mr Nkonya believes that this, in addition to embracing the advice provided by the World Bank (WB) in its report titled: Education Quality and Economic Growth, the government can go the extra mile to boost performance in public schools.