In 2002, the Zambian Government made the bold step of eliminating primary school fees. The policy, part of the Free Primary Education (FPE) initiative, had a large and immediate impact over the incoming years. The implementation of FPE reversed hitherto declining primary school enrollment experienced during the mid-1990s. In 2001, gross primary school enrollment was 76.77% and increased to 80.03% in 2002. By 2008 the rate had jumped to an all-time high of 115.03%, according to UNESCO figures.
The introduction of this policy undoubtedly contributed greatly towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education. Also, it undoubtedly gave more Zambians the opportunity to go to school.
UNESCO considers the provision of free primary education as one of the most important pro-poor policies that has the potential of reducing future income inequalities. From this perspective, Zambia’s free primary education is an incredibly important policy.
But there is a very big difference between attending school and learning. A number of studies that have been conducted in Zambia (and other African countries) reveal findings that invoke questions of whether Zambia’s education system is of sufficient quality, and in turn, will lead to advantages such as formal employment, employment creation or attracting enough quality investors to provide opportunities for beneficiaries in their adult years.
…a learning deficit
According to a 2007 assessment test by the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ), an assessment designed to assess student abilities in mathematics and reading English, nearly 44% of test takers in Zambia performed below the lowest performance benchmark in reading, compared to an average of 17% for other countries such as Kenya, Zimbabwe and Namibia that took the same assessment. In mathematics, the figure stood at 67% against an average of 32% for other countries.
Another assessment test conducted in 2013 by the World Bank Symposium for Global Learning found that little had changed; the test revealed that the learning performance among Grade 5 pupils in English and mathematics was at 35% and 38% respectively.
Only about one-third of Zambian students demonstrate basic literacy and numeracy by the time they are in Grade 5. That means, out of a classroom of 40 students, only about 14 can read.
The African Learning Barometer, an interactive tool by the Brookings Institute that analyses the state of education and learning in Sub-Saharan Africa, in 2012 found that 55.7% of school-going children in Zambia are not learning. Furthermore, the survey reviewed that 59.8% of rural learners are not learning compared to their urban peers where 48.5% were not learning.
In contrast, rural areas in Zambia are often characterised by poor or non-existent infrastructure and little or no provisions for other critical social services. This in turn negatively impacts the quality of education for rural-area children since even getting to school is a more difficult challenge and illness of a pupil or a family member may force the pupil to drop out of school entirely. Students in rural regions are further disadvantaged by the fact that their parents are generally uneducated. Again, other socioeconomic conditions and inequalities greatly impact the quality of education in rural areas compared to urban centres.
The Ministry of General Education has attributed the poor performance of primary school pupils to “…lack of interest by teachers to apply conceptual teaching methodologies in their lesson plans.” General Education Permanent Secretary, Dr. Felix Phiri said his ministry has adopted a framework to support in-service teachers with more knowledge and skills for them to apply conceptual methods in their teaching for improved learner performance.
Are teachers to blame?
Teaching is at the heart of learning. It is therefore understandable why the blame might be cast on teachers. Different stakeholders in the sector have expressed concerns over under performance, especially in government schools, where leadership is sometimes weak, appraisal arrangements are uneven, staff development is unfocused and poor behaviour and attendance is not properly addressed.
In April 2018, the Teaching Service Commission (TSC), a government entity that regulates the teaching profession, announced the introduction of aptitude tests in the teacher recruitment process.
“Some teachers could neither read nor write; the Commission will introduce aptitude tests in the recruitment process in an effort to improve service delivery and professionalise teaching,” said the commission’s Chairperson, Stanley Mhango.
The commission said the aptitude tests are meant to ensure that only competent teachers were recruited. The move is said to be due to complaints from school authorities over the caliber of some teachers deployed to their schools.
But the move, the first of its kind in teacher recruitment in the country, has received mixed reactions. The Zambia Council for Social Development (ZCSD) said the move was a confirmation that government has not been paying particular attention to provision of quality education throughout the system.
ZCSD Executive Director, Lewis Mwape said reports of failure by some recruited teachers to perform was a systemic failure by education authorities in the country to deliver quality education and introducing aptitude tests was a pedestrian manner of dealing with the problem.
“The revelation of the Teaching Service Commission must be taken seriously as it raises not just the question of quality of teacher training but also underpins the systemic failure of the entire education system,” he said.
The government, he said, should increase funding to the education sector and ensure that the Ministry of General Education allocates more resources to the Directorate of Standards within the ministry in order to deal with education quality outcomes throughout the system.
Escaping through the cracks
The National Action for Quality Education in Zambia (NAQEZ), a civil society organisation that advocates for improved education standards in Zambia, is of the view that the three national exams are not enough to assess learners and that there is need to introduce transitional tests. Transitional tests are tests given to learners to assess their readiness to proceed to an upper grade.
NAQEZ Executive Director, Aaron Chansa said the current policy of allowing learners to progress to higher grades without proper literacy and numeracy skills is retrogressive and allows such students to escape through the ‘cracks’ of the system.
“This single policy has significantly contributed to the poor quality of education in many schools. We now have upper primary school learners who are very illiterate. We [NAQEZ] strongly propose that the ministry of general education introduces transitional tests from pre-school up to Grade 5,” said Chansa.
Leakages in the system
The three exams (at Grade 7, 9 and 12) are often faced with exam malpractices, commonly referred to as ‘leakages’. This problem has further compromised the standard of education in the country. Chansa noted that examination malpractices make pupils who pass through the school system to be mere statistics as they do not acquire any skills or competences that would add value to national development.
It is not uncommon for a year to go by without news of an examination malpractice scandal during the October-December exam period. Case in point is the recent postponement of the 2018 examination by the Examination Council of Zambia (ECZ) due to exam papers being leaked to learners via social media.
Most institutions of high learning in Zambia have admission criteria that favour good results over extra-curricular performance. This, according to the 2014 ECZ Examinations Performance and Analysis report, is one of the factors that has led to desperation by candidates, parents and school authorities to explore means of getting good grades for candidates seating for exams, and thus resorting to different kinds of examination malpractices before and during national examinations.
The report further states that lack of adequate preparation for examinations by candidates makes it more likely for them to be involved in examination malpractices. The report noted that the desire for paper qualification, peer pressure, societal influences, lack of self-confidence and poor teaching also contributed to the rise in examination malpractices in Zambia.
Consequently, learners who are not prepared enough escape through the cracks of the lower-end of the education system, then proceed to tertiary institutions like the University of Zambia (UNZA) and Copperbelt University where the country’s educational problems further manifest themselves. Furthermore, UNZA, the country’s top tertiary education institution does not even rank among the world’s Top 2,000 higher education institutions and comes in at Number 65 in Africa. 17 other African countries have one or more higher education institution ranked higher than UNZA. Due to UNZA’s low ranking, Zambia struggles to compete regionally with a supply of skilled labour and many bright young people who can afford to study outside the country do and many of them do not come back, which also leaves Zambia with skills shortages.
A complicated diagnosis
Rising awareness of the scale of problems affecting the education sector has turned the spotlight on schools, classrooms and teachers – and for good reason. Education systems in the country urgently need reform. But the problems begin long before children enter school in a lethal interaction between poverty, inequality and education disadvantage.
According to Kevin Watkin, CEO of Save the Children, the education crisis in most African countries does not make media headlines. “Children don’t go hungry for want of textbooks, good teachers and a chance to learn. But this is a crisis that carries high costs. It is consigning a whole generation of children and youth to a future of poverty, insecurity and unemployment. It is starving firms of the skills that are the life-blood of enterprise and innovation. And it is undermining prospects for sustained economic growth in the world’s poorest region”.
The problems in the education system have a bearing on the labour market. Education attainment beyond secondary school is associated with substantial premiums in the public sector and in private sectors such as mining and manufacturing.
According to Herryman Moono, Researcher at the International Growth Center (IGC), in the long-term, any attempt to improve skills within the Zambian labour market will need to tackle the quality of primary and secondary school education. In the shorter-term, the post-secondary education system needs to better fit the students which are emerging from the school system and public training institutions need to collaborate more with the private sector to meet their specific needs.
Furthermore, it is all too easy to blame Zambia’s teachers for the education quality problem – but this misses the point. The country’s teachers are a product of the systems in which they operate.
Looking ahead
Zambia’s economic growth over the past decade has been built in large measure on a boom in exports of unprocessed commodities. Sustaining that growth will require entry into higher value-added areas of production and international trade – and quality education is the entry ticket. Zambia cannot build economic success on a failing education system. And it will not generate the additional jobs needed for young people joining the labour force over the next decade if the system is not fixed.
There is no high-income economy with low levels of education. The backbone of sustained and inclusive development in Zambia is education reform. From South Korea to Singapore and China, economic success has been built on the foundations of learning achievement.
Singapore’s success in education reforms is relevant to Zambia. Historically, academic standards had been low in the city-state and the education system shared many similarities with developing countries like Zambia in that it was highly scripted and uniform across all levels. Singapore previously used the teacher-centered “chalk and talk” method, still prevailing in Zambia. However, following the 1997 financial crisis, it adopted a new educational vision, “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation”, focusing on quality of learning rather than quantity. This vision became an umbrella programme under which a range of tailored initiatives were launched. The country’s solid foundation in numeracy is attributed to the adoption of the successful “Mastery Method for Mathematics”, which has gained global admiration.
The Silver lining
Daunting as the scale of the problem in education may be, many of the solutions are within reach. The government has to take the lead.
Tackling the crisis in education will require national and international action on two fronts: Governments need to get children into school – and they need to ensure that children get something meaningful from their time in the classroom. They need to close the twin deficit in access and learning.
Zambia also needs an education paradigm shift. Education planners have to look beyond counting the number of children sitting in classrooms and start to focus on learning. Teacher recruitment, training and support systems need to be overhauled to deliver effective classroom instruction. The allocation of financial resources and teachers to schools should be geared towards the improvement of standards and equalisation of learning outcomes.
There is much to celebrate in Zambia’s social and economic progress over the past decades. But if the country is to move forward in tandem with developmental agendas such as the 7NDP and Vision 2030 it has to stop the depletion of skills, talent and human potential caused by the crisis in education.
About the Author