Education Ministry mulls radical changes to curb ghost students, schools

The Education ministry is considering drastic changes to address the issue of ‘ghost’ students and schools that have been siphoning off millions of taxpayers' money in capitation.

 Education CS Julius Ogamba said the ministry is contemplating closing several schools to ensure efficient use of public resources.

 He also warned officials responsible for fake schools and ghost students will soon face consequences.

 “If resources were sent to a bank for school X, we will have to find out who signed for those resources from that bank, and action will be taken because that is criminal,” Ogamba said.

 The CS informed senators that the ongoing audit of schools and students is 75 per cent complete. So far, about 50,000 nonexistent students have been identified.

 “We have about 25 per cent to go and those anomalies are now being discovered,” he added on Wednesday.

 According to Ogamba, once the audit is finished, it will lead to major policy changes, including the closure of some schools.

 “In the verification exercise we are currently undertaking, part of the data collection involves the number of students in each institution and their current status,” he said. “This data will help the government decide whether some schools should remain registered.”

 He further said, “It will also guide us on whether to transfer some students from one school to another to ensure institutions operate optimally with the right balance of teachers and students.”

 Preliminary findings indicate that some schools have fewer than 10 students with only five teachers, Ogamba said.

 He attributed sector underfunding to unreliable data on learner numbers in primary and secondary schools.

 “When we submit our budget to the Treasury and Parliament, it gets cut because we all don't agree on the actual number of students,” he said.

 The CS also announced the ministry is launching an audit of all funds allocated to the sector as part of an effort to consolidate education financing.

 “We want to undertake an audit of all the money used in the sector, including bursaries from various institutions, donors and government agencies, to determine the exact expenditure,” he said.

 “This will allow us to analyse whether, with the current number of learners, pooling all these resources could enable us to provide free education for all children.”

 This audit aims to facilitate the consolidation of all education funds into a single pool, which would then manage the sector’s finances, he said.

 Furthermore, the ministry has introduced the Kenya Education Management Information System to improve resource allocation.

 “We want this ministry to have one single source of truth. We want every activity to be linked through this system so that we can coordinate efforts,” he said.

 “For example, with 12 million students, if you're buying books for a subject, only 12 million books should be purchased. Sometimes, with five million students, we buy 12 million books—that's waste,” he said.

 INSTANT ANALYSIS

A forensic audit of the National Education Management Information System has uncovered approximately 50,000 non-existent ‘ghost’ students in secondary schools. Basic Education PS Julius Bitok revealed this in a tense session of the National Assembly’s Education committee chaired by Julius Melly (Tinderet). This means taxpayers may have been losing up to Sh1.1 billion every year in unclear remittances, considering that each student is allocated about Sh22,200 per year in capitation.