Factors influencing education stakeholders perception on private tuition in public primary schools in Machakos sub – county , Machakos county

Abstract

Private tuition refers to be tutoring offered outside mainstream teaching. The study sought to establish the factors influencing educational stakeholders’ perception on the need for private tuition in public primary schools in Machakos Sub - County. The study was guided by three research objectives; to investigate the difference in prevalence for private tuition among parents, teachers and pupils, to determine the extent to which curriculum load influences the need for private tuition and to establish the extent to which academic performance influences the need for private tuition. The hypothesis was; t here is no significant difference in the prevalence for private tuition among educational stakeholders in public primary schools. The study employed the descriptive survey design. The target populations were all teachers, parents and pupils of public primary schools in Machakos Sub - County. Stratified sampling and simple random sampling was used to select 13 rural and 14 urban primary schools. Purposive sampling was used to pick the teachers and parents. The table by Krejcie and Morgan (1970) was used to get the sample of the pupils. A total of 405 respondents were sampled for the study and comprised of 27 parents, 27 teachers and 351 pupils. Data w as collected by us e of questionnaires and interview guide. Descriptive as well as inferential statistics were used to analyze data and results presented in tables showing frequency, standard deviations and means. The hypothesis was tested using ANOVA which showed the tuition mean prevalence between groups as 1.457 and within groups as 0.056. T he post hoc analysis was done using the Scheffe test and t he mean difference between teachers and pupils gave a mean of 0.228 and between pupils and parents gave a mean of 0.260. The findings indicated among others that private tuition is still being offered despite the government ban and that the most preferred type of tuition was school holiday tuition. Main reasons given for engagement in holiday tuition include desire to get high marks, competition for placement into secondary schools, in adequate teacher pupil ratio and a way of earning extra income by teachers. The study recommends among others that the infrastructure in all secondary schools should be improved; remunerate teachers adequately to minimize the strikes which affect syllabus coverage and to have other measures of rewarding performance other than academics.