How education system failed Bishop Aburi's pioneer class

Education CS Julius Ogamba.[Elvis Ogina, Standard]

At Bishop Aburi secondary school, the national chemistry practical was less of an examination and more of a crime scene. As 2025 candidates hovered over burettes and beakers they were seeing for the very first time in their lives, they were guessing their way through a future that the education system had already sabotaged.

For Bishop Aburi students, the national examination room wasn't a test of intellect; it was a structural ambush.

 Audits by the Kenya Secondary Education Quality Improvement Project (SEQIP) show that infrastructure rollouts for secondary school science laboratories in vulnerable sub-counties face multi-year delays, leaving thousands of schools legally registered but physically hollowed out.

While the Ministry of Education routinely boasts of aggressive teacher recruitment drives and a strict 100 percent transition policy to secondary education, the reality of the red dust of Teso South tells a different story. It’s a story of squatter students, volunteer teenagers acting as teachers, and a collective dream of producing doctors and dentists that died in a school with no power, no water and no institutional support.

The 29 students, who made up the very first class to sit for national examinations at the institution, were forced to compete with the rest of the country despite having never conducted a single practical in four years.

To them, subjects like Chemistry, Biology and Physics existed purely as text on paper; the practical lessons simply did not exist.

Bishop Okude Aburi is a public school in Teso South Constituency that was established in 2022 to expand access to education for learners  in the area.

But what should have been a functioning learning institution has, for many students, become a place of prolonged academic neglect marked by severe teacher shortages, missed lessons and near total collapse of core instruction.

“When the examination bell rang, I didn’t walk into a hall of opportunity; I walked into a trap. I had never done any practical lessons before. I was guessing,” said Rodini Emmanuel, a former student at Aburi Secondary School who scored a D.

The school situation was even more alarming in key examinable subjects. For entire terms, former learners reveal they had no teachers for the sciences, an entire school term, the very subjects that form the backbone of secondary education and determine future academic pathways.

Rodini had initially defied the odds, scoring 218 marks during the Kenya certificate of primary education (KCPE) exams.

When he joined the school at its inception in 2022, it was managed by a retired principal, George Etyang. But in 2023, citing old age, the administrator left.

“Everything changed when he left. We began living like squatters; our reporting time to school shifted from 6.30 a.m. to 7.30 a.m. and closing time was pushed forward to 4.00 p.m. Even printing opening and closing exams depended entirely on whether we could pool together money for rim papers. In my entire four years there, I never sat for a standard opening term exam,” Rodini says.

With no state deployed tutors, the school survived at the mercy of the untrained form four leavers.

A few kilometers away, Faith Atemba sits under the care of her aunt. Atemba’s 214 marks had earned her a spot at St. Mary’s Mumias girls, a prestigious school that matched her fierce ambition of becoming a dentist; instead, financial constraints forced her into Bishop Aburi.

As the second-best student in the school with a D+, her medical dreams faded in a facility that couldn’t even provide consistent electricity.

“We suffered. Madam Anne Nekesa, a primary school teacher, would step in to teach us mathematics, business, and physics during her break. That was how bad it was, yet we were told to compete with the rest of the nation,” she says.

While national headlines celebrated the 100 percent transition policy, they omitted the math.

Justus Oporo, who dreamed of becoming an electrician, was forced to drop Physics for Christian Religious Education (CRE) at the last minute because there was simply no one to teach him.

Our investigation established that the school is yet to de-register after its official registration elapsed.

It took a desperate,10-kilometer protest march by stranded students directly to the TSC offices in September 2025 to force the government's hand.

In 2022, it was launched with a promising enrolment of 150 learners under an acting administrator.

2023–2025: Total stagnation. Zero TSC teachers deployed. Instruction handled entirely by primary school volunteers and Form Four leavers. Enrolment plummets to 50.

September 2025: Protests force the release of the IPPD code. A substantive principal was posted just weeks before national exams.

Today, the institution has become an absolute ghost school.

On what should be a busy morning at Bishop Aburi, only tractors and tipper lorries ply the road near the school, kicking up thick clouds of dust and generating constant noise.

Only five grade 10 students and six form three- and on the day we visited, they were few with the principal.

“We have Grade 10 students under the new curriculum. In January, 13 reported. By the end of the term, we were left with six and at the moment, only three are present. We also had 18 Form Three students, but today we only have six,” laments Richard Okello, the newly posted school principal.

Today, in a bizarre twist of administrative irony, a full staff of four salaried, state-funded TSC professionals reports to work daily to teach a total student body of exactly six remaining students.

Out of the 29 pioneer candidates, none scored higher than a C-minus. The school posted a dismal mean score of 2.074 (a D-minus average).

Parents say candidates were tested on topics they had never fully covered. Practicals also exposed their children who had never stepped into a laboratory.

“We visited all offices from the sub-county to county. Even this January, we ended up quarrelling with the officers because of posting a principal towards the exam. Today the school remains ghosted,” says Alfred Opure, a parent.

Claire Ejakait, a 26-year-old graduate volunteer from Kibabii University who volunteered at the school from 2024 until mid-2025, describes a scene of professional degradation.

One of those leavers was Kelvin Inoni, who did his Form Four at father Okudoi, scoring a C plain.

“I joined the school in January and left in September 2025 because I was going to join college. I did my Form Four at father Okudoi and got a C plain of 45 points. I was not a qualified teacher but had to teach because the agriculture class had 18 students and they really needed help,” he says.

An extended spot-check reveals that Bishop Aburi is not an isolated crisis. A dark cloud of teacher shortages and regulatory lapses hangs over the entire Teso South constituency, exposing a chaotic distribution framework.

At Father Erapu Secondary, where 25 candidates are registered this year, Principal Rose confirmed that the school only started receiving capitation in the third term of 2023 and is currently in a frantic race against total de-registration following the expiration of its provisional certificate in December 2025.

At Father Okudoi, Principal Stanley Wachudi faces an overwhelming deficit.

“Personally, I have to teach 16 lessons a week. You can imagine the pressure,” Wachudi reveals.

When confronted with these failures, stakeholders switch to finger-pointing. Former member of the County Education Board (CEB) and the school's sponsor, Bishop John Okude, blames the community for negligence.

However, Leo Ekapten, a former director of special needs education at the Ministry of Education, points the finger directly at deep-seated institutional failures within the modern ministry.

“For a school to be registered today, one spends upwards of Ksh 20,000. The officers in the education ministry ask for money without shame.”

According to Professor Egara Kabaji, a distinguished education expert and seasoned university administrator, these systemic gaps require an immediate overhaul of policy rather than localized blame games.

“A review of the policy and balancing of teachers is needed in this country; it’s not a Busia case only. Issues of inequality have been there; in marginalized counties, it’s the direst. It’s an issue that has to be addressed systematically, not haphazardly,” Professor Kabaji notes.

“The government needs to merge these schools and pool resources to have enough teachers for learners to achieve an optimal level. Subjecting students to untrained teachers is a dangerous trend and diminishes the future of learners. The inspectors came to that school, saw the situation, and gave an okay for Bishop Aburi to be a school; it’s a failure of a system.”

During Madaraka Day celebrations on June 1, 2026, President William Ruto defended ongoing education sector reforms, asserting that the education budget has grown to over ksh702 billion, with more than 100,000 teachers recruited within three years.

Alfred Opure, a retired teacher and BOM member, noted that a deputy principal was posted to the school in January but fled immediately after surveying the dismal conditions.

“I am worried about the principal and teachers who have been posted here; they might also leave. Everybody should come on board so that we fight for this school,” Opure warns.

The plight of Bishop Okude Aburi Secondary School reflects a wider pattern of educational inequality highlighted by education lobby group Usawa Agenda in its 2024 Western Region learning assessment report.

The report notes that children in rural areas continue to face significant barriers to accessing quality education compared to their counterparts in urban centres.

Usawa Agenda warns that unless deliberate measures are taken to address these inequalities, thousands of learners in rural communities risk being left behind despite the country's commitment to equitable access to education.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), children in rural areas often face greater barriers to accessing quality education than their urban counterparts.

Efforts to obtain a response from the county director of education on the state of infrastructure and compliance with operational requirements in schools within Teso-subcounty, specifically Bishop Aburi, which has been operating without capitation, basic facilities required for the effective functioning of a learning institution, substantial supply of textbooks despite having a very low population, were unsuccessful.

The standard also wanted a comment on why several schools within Teso sub-county have not been re-registered, raising questions about compliance with regulatory requirements and whether the necessary quality assurance inspections have been conducted.

The standard also sought comment from the county director teachers service commission (TSC) through formal letter, on the issue of staff balancing within Teso, specifically Bishop Aburi which has four teaching staff with an enrolment of six students, and why a deputy principal posted at the same school has never reported with claims that the post was done verbally without an official letter but neither office had responded by the time of publication.