Access to and participation in basic education in Tanzania: a decade of key achievements and challenges

Abstract

This article establishes the achievements and hurdles of accessing and participating in basic education in Tanzania, covering the period from 2010 to 2019. The basic education in Tanzania comprises pre-primary, primary and ordinary level secondary education. The article reviews and documents trends in access and students' dropout rates, number of teachers and qualified teaching staff ratio, as well as students' performance in national examinations. Information was generated through a critical review of secondary data from national education reports, national basic education statistics and the 2016-2021 Education Sector Development Plan. The findings reveal that in the last decade, access to primary education increased substantially. Primary education gross enrolment ratio (GER) exceeded 100% while on average, pre-primary GER was 59.8% and 47.2% in secondary education (Form 1-4). Despite this commendable achievement, the percentage of out-of-school age children in primary schools increased ten-fold from 4.6 in 2010 to 46.4% in 2019. Also, the findings show that more than 60% of both pre-primary and secondary school-age children were not enrolled to schools. Besides, the increased access to education has posed several quality challenges as evidenced by large class sizes, insufficient teaching staff and big numbers of school dropouts. In terms of learning outcomes, and despite the noted shortfalls, the findings indicate that the pass rate has increased for 30% both in primary and secondary education. In light of the findings, the study recommends that teachers should be recruited and deployed particularly to lower grades, the community should be engaged to address socio-cultural factors which affect students' participation and retention in school, and teacher training should teach multi-age teaching pedagogies to respond to the teaching challenges in mixedage classes in lower grades.

Analysing Mathematics Performance in Tanzanian Primary Schools through the Lens of Candidate Items Response Analysis Reports

“…In the current Curriculum for primary school, Mathematics is a compulsory subject for all students from standard III to VI (MoEST, 2023). The overall enrolment of primary school students has increased in the last decade (Amani, 2021) which indicates an increase in the number of students studying mathematics in primary schools. For example, Figure 1.1 shows that from 2012 to 2022, the number of students who sat for the PSLE has increased tremendously from around 800,000 to 1.4 million students.…”