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Eight streams for secondary schools
2007-08-28 10:14:37
By Sinde Ndewasinde
A few days ago, the government presented new intentions for secondary school classes. The government will double the number of secondary school streams from the present four to eight.
This was stated by the Chief Education Officer in the Ministry of Education, Mr. Ricky Mpama.
He explained that this expansion will apply from Form One to Form Four classes and that the purpose of these extra classes is to take in the soaring number of standard Seven pupils who succeed in their exam.
Therefore, the government is showing that indeed it is serious when it said that every child who passes Standard Seven Exam has an opportunity to go to secondary school.
The schools that will be used in the implementation of this exercise will be government Secondary schools since they already have the necessary starting tools and infrastructure.
This grand expansion is planned to take place as early as January, 2008. The government is indeed to be commended for all this effort of ensuring that the nation’s children are properly nurtured and tutored and thus acquire the necessary skills to enable them become full productive members of society.
However, we need to remember that while all of this is well and good, there will be so many hurdles to scale along the way.
Even presently, we hear so often of schools which do not have enough teachers.
It was not long ago that we had to shake our heads in bewilderment after learning of the school that had only one teacher and of the pupil who sits in for the teacher when the sole teacher has to attend to matters outside the school.
But the Chief Education Officer already allayed our fears for he said that the government had taken the necessary steps which would ensure that teachers are available for these extra classrooms.
After all, there is no point in providing extra classrooms if the exercise does not happen in tandem with the provisions of teachers.
Furthermore, as the Lake Victoria zone chapter of Tanzania Heads of Secondary School Association (Tahossa) noted last weekend, the government has not fulfilled its promise to subsidize public secondary schools after it directed school fees to be halved from 40,000 shillings to 20,000 shillings per student.
The government promised that it would compensate the schools, but this has not happened.
Therefore, schools are having to strain themselves and indeed to do without some of the items and services that could be obtained with these funds, that is why heads of schools are reminding about the money.
Take for example the school in Mwanza whose female students staged a demonstration asking for bathrooms to be built in their school.
These are girls, but they usually go to a lake to take a bath because they have no other alternative. This surely is unacceptable.
Moreover, there are complaints all the time of falling educational standards in schools.
Teachers and headmasters in particular need to be able to acquire facilities and equipment and even services needed for them to be able to carry out their duties of educating and guiding the nation’s children.
Recently, we have heard of secondary school students turning to violence in order for their demands to be met of course there is no excuse for such behaviour on the part of the students.
But we should play our part of making sure that student are reasonably provided for and then we can ask them to be disciplined and concentrate on their studies. We shall have earned the moral right to chastise them.
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