Case Study Segment (CSS) On Primary Education in Tanzania
Authors: Albert Issack 
Published: November 2024

Unlike those educational policies implemented before, Tanzania Education and training policies of 1995 and 2014 addressed the issues of education quality and access but the implementation of these two addressed issues still a big challenge to all policies due to the fact that, quality education depends on many variables such as the number of students enrolled, availability of competent teachers, availability of quality infrastructures, and teaching resources. According to Aina O et al..(2023) as cited to Scheerens, Luyten [20] education quality model consists of four components namely: contexts such as education’s demographic, social and economic contexts, the second component is input which includes financial and human resources, third component is process which contains access, participation and progression, he transition from school to work, the learning environment, and the organization of school, the fourth component is output /outcomes which imply the achievement of labor-market outcomes. However in Tanzania context the government and private sector train teachers at different levels from early education to higher education then the trained and qualified teachers recruited to public or private schools yearly, but the number of teachers recruited yearly is not big enough to accommodate the number of enrolled students particularly in schools located in rural areas which has very poor infrastructures, therefore many teachers don’t prefer to teach in those schools and eventually most of the schools allocated in rural areas have shortage of teachers as well as poor academic performance. On the other hand, teachers inservice discouraged to advance their knowledge owing to the fact that when teacher take study leave he/she isn’t eligible to get promotion,similarly, when teacher finish the studies and get recategorization the system doesn’t allow promotion up to four years, this kills teachers motivation to advance academically and eventually kills education quality,if education system promotes teachers to advance their knowledge we could find many teachers with PHD’s teaching in primary schools. Number of students enrollment within the period of four years of implementing the policy the number of standard one to standard seven pupils enrolled in Tanzania was increased by 5.1% from 8.22 million in 2014 to 8.63 million in the year 2018 and the number of students kept on increasing for the coming years, however there are some challenges that make the parents not send their children to school regardless education is free as declared by the government when implementing education and training policy of 2014, the challenges include poor economic condition amongst parents which make them difficult to afford purchasing school uniforms, exercise books and pen to their children especially people who are living in extreme poverty, government of Tanzania committed to provide free education but in reality education provided is not free 100% because other costs still incurred by parents therefore those who live in extreme poverty find it difficult to afford day to day school expenses. Therefore the aim of this report is to examine primary education in Tanzania in terms quality and access regarding to the implementation of various education policies in Tanzania.