Understanding Local Realities of Quality Education in Kenya: Pupil,Parent and Teacher Perspectives

In 2003, UNICEF-Kenya and the Kenyan Ministry of Education introduced the ‘Child Friendly Schools' initiative to encourage educational policy makers and practitioners to look for alternative ways to measure the quality of primary schools beyond pupils' test scores. In 2009, Kenyan government officials distributed the Child Friendly Schools Monitoring Toolkit (CMT) across all public primary schools, promoting it as an exercise in school self-evaluation for measuring educational quality. Senior education officials developed the CMT with 50 indicators for local stakeholders' use when measuring a school's level of child-friendliness. This study investigates the relevance of these 50 indicators to local perspectives of quality education. The study's findings suggest that the CMT's 50 indicators represent only 68% of what pupils, parents and teachers describe as factors that negatively or positively contribute to levels of child-friendliness in their schools. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach for data analysis, 33 ‘new’ indicators for child-friendliness emerge from the participants' responses. The study compares and synthesizes these new categories with the 50 original CMT indicators by creating an ‘Enhanced Child Friendly Schools Monitoring Toolkit’ (ECMT) for implementation in Kenyan primary schools. The revised ECMT indicators appear to capture 93% of what pupils, parents and teachers describe as factors influencing a school's level of child-friendliness. In the end, the study's findings call for a renewed dialogue between top-down and bottom-up perspectives of quality education in determining future criteria for measuring the levels of child-friendliness across Kenyan public primary schools.