By Tobias Ogutu
A bad tooth is not worth keeping, whether it causes pain or not. Dentists always recommend removing a bad tooth to prevent it from affecting the healthy ones. We often have a painless but problematic tooth that we complain about, yet lack the courage to remove. Similarly, the school administration during the admission of grade one students is like a painless, bad tooth. Admitting a child to any school in Kenya for grade one involves many burdens for parents, some of which are unnecessary.
Many head teachers in primary and junior secondary schools cause significant injustice to parents each year during the admission of Grade One students. First, the head teachers do not allow parents the freedom to choose where to buy the school uniform. Instead, the school dictates which tailoring shop parents must use, requiring a receipt at admission to confirm that the purchase was made from the designated shop. This practice is not about ensuring quality or uniformity; rather, it serves as a way for head teachers to earn commissions from each parent who buys from the recommended shop.
Mrs. Salome Adhiambo, a well-known and experienced tailor, recounts how the headteacher of Victoria Primary School in Kisumu sent her away with her child in 2023 because she had no receipt to prove that her daughter’s uniform was purchased from the Black-Berry shop. According to Salome, while waiting, the headteacher had previously commented on how good the uniform looked on her daughter. However, when the headteacher later learned that the uniform was not from the recommended shop, everything changed, and Salome was forced to buy at least one pair from Black-Berry for the admission to be successful.
Many parents have gone through exactly what Salome experienced, including my parents when I was admitted to first grade. This year, when admitting a child to grade one, I went through the same experience at Xaverian Primary School in Kisumu.
During a parent meeting at Pand Pier School, a parent posed a question to the head teacher that resonated with several other parents, but it went unanswered. Mr. Paul wanted to know why, each year, new students admitted to grade one are required to bring a fee for furniture, yet the classroom size remains unchanged. According to Mr. Paul, no student typically leaves primary school with any furniture, so he wonders where the three hundred desks that the school claims to produce annually for new admissions actually go.
The furniture fee and the preferred school uniform shop are two ways primary school headteachers exploit parents, making Grade One admission costly. School heads take advantage of the fact that parents have no choice but to comply with their demands during this period. While some parents view this as a one-time expense they can manage, many low-income families are unable to enroll their children in school due to these self-imposed rules by the headteachers.
We now appeal to the Ministry of Education to take note of this issue and consistently send officers to all schools to ensure fairness during Grade One admissions. If the Ministry can deploy officials to all schools during the national examinations, then monitoring Grade One admissions is certainly feasible. It is high time this painless but bad tooth be removed.
