Failure by the government to address the teacher shortage and infrastructure issues could derail the 100 per cent transition from primary to secondary schools, an MP has said.
Naivasha MP Jane Kihara on Tuesday said there is need to construct more secondary students in the constituency.
"We have 70 and 55 primary and secondary schools, and we have plans to open more secondary schools to achieve the 100 transition,” she said.
Esther Miring’u from the Teachers Service Commission said Naivasha has a shortage of 372 teachers in secondary schools.
“This has hurt learning as the number of students continue to increase. We are asking the MP to lobby so that we can get more teachers,” she said.
They spoke at Milimani High School when Naivasha CDF started disbursing Sh30 million to needy students in the constituency.
MP Kihara also decried the formula used to allocate bursary in constituencies. She said Wajir West, which has 27,000 registered voters, gets an equal amount as Naivasha, which has more than 120,000 voters.
“We are working on a bill in Parliament to address the issue of revenue allocation and this will go a long way in supporting the education sector,” she said.
The MP urged the county government to make public the list of students who had benefited from bursary to avoid double allocation from the CDF.
Kihara said the recently constructed Naivasha Technical Institute lacks tutors and hostels. It is yet to start operations.
Naivasha Day Secondary School principal Joseph Mwangi said there is an urgent need to ensure more teachers are deployed and infrastructure developed.
“Currently Naivasha Day and Milimani High schools are the only public-day secondary schools in Naivasha serving 11 primary schools. This leads to congestion,” he said.
