Background
Teachers advisory centres
Methodology
Findings
Evaluation
Conclusion
References
Cephas Odini
Socio-economic and political context
Kenya is located in East Africa and lies between a longitude of 34° north and 42° east and a latitude of 4° north and 4° south. It covers an area of approximately 582,646 sq. km and is bordered by Ethiopia and Sudan to the north, Somalia and the Indian Ocean to the east, Uganda to the west and Tanzania to the south.
Kenya consists of eight areas called provinces. The next lower administrative units are districts, followed by divisions, locations, sub-locations, and villages. The climate varies throughout the country and is determined by topography, altitude and precipitation. Most of the northern and eastern part of the country is semi-arid and less than one-third of the country is arable.
Kenya achieved her independence in 1963 after a protracted struggle during which the indigenous people regained self-determination and control of their destiny from the British colonial administration. Since then, the country has enjoyed political stability.
On the basis of census statistics, Kenya's population increased from 5.4 million in 1948 to 16.1 million in 1979 (Kenya. Central Bureau of Statistics 1995). Estimates from the 1979 population census indicated that the population growth rate in Kenya was 3.8% per year. The population is currently estimated at 27 million.
The population growth rate in the urban areas is more than 7% per annum. The population of the capital city, Nairobi, has increased from 897,000 in 1980 to approximately 2 million in 1997. This increase can be attributed in large part to rural-urban migration.
As a result of high fertility and declining mortality, Kenya is characterized by a young population. Almost 50% of Kenya's population is less than 15 years of age. The momentum generated by high fertility and declining mortality implies that the population growth rate will remain high for some time (Kenya. National Council for Population and Development 1994).
In Kenya, agriculture remains the leading sector in stimulating economic growth. The most important foreign exchange earners are coffee and tea in the agricultural sector and tourism in the non-agricultural sector. Although the government has played an important role in the economy, private enterprise has been given more weight in the development process and today accounts for about two-thirds of the gross domestic product (GDP).
The economy's performance, which has attracted the attention of international bodies and many individual researchers, has tended to elicit two types of responses. There are those who have admired Kenya's economic achievements terming them as 'remarkable', especially when considered against the general background of other African countries. There are others, however, who have tended to regard the country's economic record since Independence as superficial, arguing that its experience gives a good example of 'economic growth' without 'economic development', where the benefits from growth do not reach the really poor target groups (Ikiara 1988).
In spite of the upswings and downswings that the Kenyan economy has undergone in the post-Independence era, its performance can be said to have been generally impressive. GDP in real terms has grown fairly strongly, for example, real GDP increased by almost three times between 1964 and 1984 from K£715 million to K£1,900 million. The gross investment, wage employment, government expenditure and revenues and other indicators all show immense expansion of macro-economic variables during the period.
Educational policies and practices
Kenya government has continued to invest heavily in education because it believes that education and training are important ingredients for creation of the manpower required for all aspects of national development. In addition to government contributions, Kenyans have joined hands in the true spirit of self-help ('harambee') to build and maintain physical facilities in schools and colleges for the education and training of their children.
After Independence in 1963, it was clear that the education system inherited from the colonial era did not meet the social, political and economic needs of independent Kenya. The first post-Independence Kenya Education Commission, under the chairmanship of Professor Ominde, was set up in 1964 to review the whole of Kenya's education system and has influenced and guided national policy for education ever since.
Subsequent reviews of the educational system in areas of structure and curriculum have been carried out through the following commissions: Ndegwa 1971; Gachathi 1976; Mackay 1981; Kariithi 1983; and the Presidential Working Party on Education and Manpower Training for the Next Decade and Beyond 1988. All these commissions testify to the important role that education and training continue to play in nation building.
The Mackay Report of 1981 recommended changes in the structure of education from the former 7-4-2-3 to an 8-4-4 system of education, which was implemented in phases starting with primary education in 1985. The 8-4-4 system is a three-tiered formal education system composed of a free eight-year primary cycle followed by a four-year secondary school cycle and a four-year university education or other skill training programmes.
The 8-4-4 system of education offers a practically-oriented curriculum and has introduced technical and vocational skills which students graduating at the various levels of the schooling system can use for either self-employment, salaried employment or further training, thus providing a wide range of employment opportunities.
Important as it is in the creation of employment opportunities, there are still many limitations to the implementation of the 8-4-4 education system in the country. One major problem arises from the fact that the 8-4-4 system of education requires expensive equipment in laboratories and workshops which many schools and colleges cannot afford.
Although formal pre-school education is a relatively new development in Kenya, it has already become a firmly established sector of the national education system. Since independence, there has been a rapid growth of pre-primary schools which mainly cater for the three to six year-old age group. There are approximately 18,000 pre-primary schools catering for 900,000 children in the country.
Primary education is, however, regarded as the basic cycle of the national education system. The programme lasts eight years and aims at providing functional and practical education to the majority of children who terminate formal education at the end of the cycle. At the same time, primary school education caters for those wishing to continue with schooling. Thus the main general objective of primary education, in which the age range is six to fourteen years, is to prepare all children who attend to participate fully in the social, economic and political life of the nation.
Primary education in Kenya is also universal and free but not compulsory. The government took definite steps towards universal primary education through the abolition of school fees for Standards I to IV in 1974 and for the rest of the primary classes in 1979. However, due to the very high growth in population coupled with rising financial responsibilities, the government has adopted a 'cost-sharing policy' to facilitate the provision of basic education for all.
There has been tremendous development in primary education since Kenya became an independent nation. This expansion is reflected especially in the increase in the number of children enrolled in schools, the number of teachers and the number of schools. The enrolment has increased from 892,000 in 1963 to about seven million. Similarly, the number of teachers has increased from 23,000 to 185,000 while schools have increased from 6,000 to 14,000. However, there is a wide regional variation in the participation rate of children aged between six and fourteen years in primary education. Low participation rates are found mainly in the semi-arid and pastoral districts.
The 8-4-4 system of education shortened the time allocated to the secondary education programme from six to four years and expanded the curriculum to include applied subjects. In terms of growth, there has been a very rapid increase in the number of schools and enrolments since Independence. In 1963 there were only 151 secondary schools with a total enrolment of 31,120 pupils. In 1997 the total number of schools had risen to 3,500 and the enrolment to 700,000 students.
Secondary schools fall under three major categories according to the type of management. Firstly, there are schools which are fully financed and maintained by the government. Secondly, there are those which are sponsored by communities or religious bodies but receive government assistance in the form of teachers and sometimes some financial support in form of grants. The third category is the unaided schools. In this group the majority are community 'harambee' (self-help) schools which do not receive any form of government assistance and private schools which are established and run by individuals or groups of individuals on a commercial basis.
The country has five national public universities with a student enrolment of 45,000 and four major private universities (together with other degree-awarding bodies applying for university status). There are three national polytechnics and twelve institutes of technology offering skills training in the rural areas.
Information provision
An overview of information systems in Kenya has been given by this writer in a previous article (Odini 1993). It was observed that the country has a fairly good information infrastructure which forms a solid base on which information services can develop.
The importance of information services in general as a vital resource for national development is unquestionable. There is, however, a need for improved access to information by the various user groups and for the availability of information at the right time and in an appropriate form. It is to be regretted that information systems in the country are so much under-utilized owing to various factors such as the prevalence of information services which have been designed without a proper analysis of the needs of users, high levels of illiteracy and language barriers. However, there is still ample opportunity for information experts in Kenya to stimulate the use of information if more attention is paid to the information needs of the various groups and the communication process among each group of the user community.
Although Kenya has no comprehensive information policy, there are several sectoral policies in the form of legislation, regulations and guidelines, covering, for instance, public libraries (Kenya National Library Service (KNLS) Board Act); archives (Public Archives Act); deposit material (Books and Newspapers Act); Sessional Paper No. 5 of 1982 dealing with science and technology information; and District Focus Circular No. 1/86 on the establishment of District Information and Documentation Centres. Other relevant laws include the Copyright Act, Universities Act, Education Act and Sessional Paper No.6 of 1988.
Kenya's national information systems comprise the nation's libraries, documentation centres, archives, records centres and learning resource centres. These systems are supported and made effective by other agencies dealing with the generation, enumeration, and transfer of information such as the publishing industry, statistical bureaux, telecommunications, informatics and the mass media.
Although little documentation is available on the use of information by the school population in the country, it is believed that this group makes greater use of information services provided in the country than other groups of the user community, for example: farmers and rural communities; professionals in various fields; policy makers; and administrators. However, the prevailing scholastic methods in the country give little encouragement to the development of free personal enquiry. There is too much dependence on 'chalk and talk' with little library usage, since students/pupils do not need to obtain ideas from various sources to pass examinations. This is unfortunate since it is in early life that a taste for books and the habit of using libraries and their resources or educational materials are most easily acquired (Aina, 1984).
Psychologists emphasize repeatedly the significance of childhood experiences in moulding the adult. It is to be regretted that there is not sufficient locally-published reading material for children in Kenya. Also regrettable is that there is in Kenya no official policy requiring schools (both primary and secondary) to have libraries. School libraries are not given any official support from the government. It is left to the initiative of heads of schools and Parents Associations to establish, equip and maintain libraries in their own schools.
Some head-teachers use some of the funds meant for sports and other related extra-curricula activities to establish and stock their school libraries. Old schools, especially those in urban areas which were established during the colonial period, generally have better school libraries than relatively new ones in the rural areas. These few schools with adequate school libraries include Starehe Boys Centre, Nairobi School, Pangani Girls, Lenana School, Alliance High School (both boys and girls) and Kenya High School. Resources in these libraries comprise both printed materials in the form of books and periodicals as well as non-book media such as audio-visual materials.
Although some school libraries therefore continue to be developed to support the education system, their development is not uniform throughout the country but tends to favour urban schools at the expense of rural ones. This means that the majority of the school population are denied accessibility to a reasonable variety of educational materials.
In order to address the problem of inaccessibility to educational materials by the school population, the Ministry of Education incorporated Teachers Advisory Centres (TACs) in the Inspectorate Section in the early 1970s. Teachers Advisory Centres were established with an aim of enabling teachers in primary schools to access educational materials such as books and audio-visual equipment. It was hoped that the use of Teachers Advisory Centres by teachers would improve their instructional quality and that their pupils would gain indirectly through teachers' improved instruction or through the loan of classroom materials.
A similar initiative took place at the secondary level, with 26 Learning Resource Centres (LRCs) being established during the early 1990s. These were part of a DFID supported programme, the Secondary English Language Project (SELP). An element within the project was the provision of English language materials and the LRCs were set up to manage these. They aimed to provide materials for those teaching in secondary schools in the district surrounding the LRC. DFID supplied reference and textbooks (not only for English language teaching but in all subjects of the secondary curriculum) and class sets of reading books to each LRC, as well as typewriters, duplicating machines and stationery. The organization Voluntary Service Overseas provided the first LRC managers. However the usefulness of LRCs has been limited by the fact that many schools are not members, either because they are unaware of its services or because they do not want to pay the annual subscription. The LRCs have not been able to become self-sustainable but still rely on donations. Moreover, many of the teachers who were trained through the SELP project, either locally or in the UK, have left secondary schools for better paying jobs in colleges or universities.
The Kenya government through the School Inspectorate of the Ministry of Education attaches great importance to continuing education programmes for teachers. Teacher education is conceived of as a career-long process in order to avoid situations such as those reported by the World Bank:
'... many schools in developing countries fail to reach or teach children because available resources are not used efficiently and effectively by the teachers concerned' (World Bank Report, 1990).
Kahn (1991) reports that centres for teachers and resources have been established world wide. These centres, despite their varying names (Learning Resource Centres, Pedagogical Centres and Advisory Centres), have the common characteristic of providing classroom support for teachers. The teachers should be given the right kind of support since their potential for development is limitless and their competence is constantly being tested in the class. Recognizing the teachers' arduous task and supporting them in their work is the aim of Teachers Resource or Advisory Centres (Adams 1975).
In order to fulfil their educational responsibility towards school pupils, Ministry of Education officials, particularly school inspectors, education officers, school headmasters, must ensure that a suitable learning environment is provided and that teachers are enabled not only to develop their pupils' reading ability but also to encourage independent learning and the acquisition of good information skills. Pupils should be assisted to develop logical creative approaches to their subjects of study in order to attain the national educational objectives.
Co-operation among the stakeholders and particularly between teachers and Teachers Advisory Centre Tutors (TAC tutors) is essential to there being an effective collection of resources in a centre. This co-operation is particularly important in the provision in the centre of books and others resources which match pupils' and teachers' needs and in the provision of appropriate resources in general. In order to be able to develop a collection of high standard in terms
In 1978 the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education established 'The Primary Teacher Updating Committee' to examine the possibility of developing and setting up a 'Primary Teacher Up-dating Programme'. This Committee examined the TAC programme in detail and recommended that:
· the role of TACs in advising and updating teachers and in carrying out research at the local level must be made clear to all TAC staff;· the number of TACs must be increased to give an adequate service to teachers and these centres must be established in central and accessible venues;
· staff must be increased to enable the TACs to fulfil their role effectively;
· TACs should be housed in appropriately designed and equipped buildings. The Committee went ahead and suggested that a TAC should have the following: facilities:
- lecture, display and home science rooms
- office and store
- workshop
- library
- day sanitation unit· resources and equipment:
- curriculum material currently in use in primary schools, professional reference books including books on the methodology of teaching the various subjects in the primary schools;- tools suitable for the making of teaching/learning resources;
- audio-visual resources including: radio/cassette player, overhead projector, slide projector, camera;
- reprographic equipment including: typewriters and duplicating machines;
- a portable generator for use where electricity was lacking;
- home science equipment.
· transport in the form of a van. The Committee noted that it was essential that TAC staff be able to travel with resource materials to teachers in the district;
· adequate finance for the effective running of the TACs. It was suggested that TACs be financed by the Inspectorate Headquarters and that funds be allocated to them through the DEO's Office.
Some of the recommendations made by the Committee, for example: outlining the role of TAC tutor; increasing the number of TACs; addition of more staff; have been implemented. However, due to lack funds, it has not been possible to implement many of the other recommendations.
TACs have benefited from the support provided by DFID from 1992 onwards to the strengthening of primary education in Kenya. The first phase of this support aimed at raising the quality of teaching and learning in the core subject areas of mathematics, science and English by establishing TAC-based in-service training. As a part of this support, book boxes and resource materials, including a package of consumables, were distributed to 239 zonal TACs and 42 district TACs. DFID also assisted with the construction of 61 TACs. However, this support has not been uniformly distributed throughout the country. Those districts which are relatively disadvantaged in socio-economic development have received greater supplies of educational materials than others.
Functions
Teachers Advisory Centres were established to carry out the following functions:
· provide convenient and appropriately equipped centres for updating teachers;· prepare and produce support materials for use on updating courses and in any follow-up activities required;
· carry out research in primary teaching methods and the use of locally available teaching resources and communicate the results of such researches to the classroom teachers and national curriculum specialists at the Kenya Institute of Education (KIE);
· take an active part in the development of the primary school curriculum by maintaining a close and adequate contact with the teachers and local subject panels, so that relevant feedback may be readily available when research and assessment of various programmes are called for;
· provide educational counselling services not only for the teachers but for the community as a whole;
· act as a receiving centre for various resource materials from agencies like KIE and also act as distributing centres for these materials;
· by working closely with teachers colleges, help expose students to what goes on in primary schools and how to use TACs when they leave college.
Providing access to educational materials was thus one of their functions, albeit one of many.
Governance
The Teachers Advisory Centres, as a national service, are administered by the Ministry of Education's Inspectorate Section. In the field the Teacher Advisory Centres are manned by centre tutors who report to their respective District Inspectors of Schools.
The tutors work in close collaboration with their respective area assistant primary school inspectors and principals of the primary teachers colleges where the centres are situated, since they are responsible for TAC operations and for providing the Ministry of Education with a record and evaluation of their work.
KIE, a body responsible for curriculum research and development, works with the TACs in collaboration with the Inspectorate.
Target user population
The user population comprises teachers in primary schools within close proximity to a TAC, usually within a radius often km. This is common in small-sized and more developed districts which have a higher school population. However, there are more difficult and large districts with few schools spread out at long distances and with poor access roads. It is common in such districts to find TACs located very far away from their target user populations.
Choice of methodology and rationale
A preliminary workshop was held in London in September 1997 attended by local researchers including this writer at which the project co-ordinator was the resource person. The workshop participants agreed on a case study approach and went ahead to develop case study outlines.
The case study approach, employing mainly semi-structured interviews, was chosen since it was particularly suitable for providing an in-depth analysis of accessibility to educational materials in Teachers Advisory Centres by the school population. The case study methodology enabled the researcher to concentrate on specific instances or situations and to identify the various interactive processes at work in TACs. Some of these processes would probably have remained hidden in a larger scale survey.
The methodology was found to be particularly suitable since it was felt that it was the only approach that would be able to provide data which would determine efficiency, effectiveness and economy. However, care was taken to ensure that country context in which the Teachers Advisory Centre operated was not ignored since the successes of the TAC could not be determined in isolation, without due regard to the contribution made by other similar modalities such as school libraries. The case study method as applied in this study therefore involved collecting relevant background information or data from schools, school inspectors, education officials, TAC tutors and teachers about the issues involved in accessibility to educational materials by the school population.
Data collection and analysis
Data was collected in general discussions that this researcher held with several teachers, TAC tutors and education officials on several occasions.
Some relevant documents about the country and Teachers Advisory Centres in particular were carefully studied and notes made on them. The documents examined included statistical abstracts published by the Central Bureau of Statistics in the Ministry of Planning and National Development, the Demographic and Health Survey, the Official Handbook on Kenya. With regard to Teachers Advisory Centres very useful data was obtained from annual reports and several unpublished records and articles written by education officials, school inspectors and TAC tutors.
The main research instrument, however, consisted of a semi-structured interview framework for obtaining information on user satisfaction and impact which was administered to teachers by this researcher assisted by postgraduate students at the Faculty of Information Sciences in Moi University.
The main analytical approach employed in this study was based on a framework developed by Orr in 1993. According to this framework, the concept of 'Goodness' has two basic aspects; 'how good is the service' and 'how much good does it do?' While the first aspect concentrates on capability, potential and latent ability, that is, inputs, the analysis in this study has concentrated on the second aspect, which deals with value, effectiveness and benefits, that is outputs.
In assessing performance, emphasis was placed on economy, efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction, market penetration and cost-effectiveness.
Sample
The study was conducted in Uasin Gishu district of Rift Valley Province. The district is divided into zones and a Teachers Advisory Centre had been established to serve primary school teachers in every zone. Six zones were selected for the study based on their geographical location and after consultations between the District Inspector of Schools and this researcher.
Three schools were selected in each of the six zones but an attempt was made to include one school which was in close proximity to the TAC, one which was located mid-way between the TAC and the zonal boundary and one which was furthest or among the furthest away from the TAC. Since there were six zones considered for the study a total of 18 schools were selected.
In each of the sampled schools six teachers were selected for interview employing a stratified purposive sampling technique to ensure that both TAC users and non-users were included in the sample. This was important since the researcher was interested in hearing from both groups - one comprised of those teachers who used their respective TAC and the other group comprised of those who did not. A total of 108 teachers were interviewed in the district.
Problems
At the time when this researcher was preparing to go to the field to collect data, teachers went on a nation-wide strike demanding higher salaries. When the Kenya National Union of Teachers and the government resolved their differences and teachers resumed their normal duties, there were only two weeks left before an early vacation for most of the school population, except for candidates sitting national examinations and their invigilators.
The early end of year vacation meant that this researcher had to make the necessary appointments and conduct interviews with more than one hundred teachers within a period of only two weeks. To resolve this problem, the researcher e-mailed the project co-ordinator in UK to seek authority to involve postgraduate students of Information Sciences at Moi University in data collection; permission was granted.
However, even with the assistance of research assistants (students) it would still have been very difficult to extend the study to another district - a disadvantaged district - and to include the Learning Resource Centres set up to serve secondary school teachers, as earlier planned, since the time available for the case study data collection was so limited. A decision was therefore made to introduce some adjustment in the data collection instruments and to confine the study to Uasin Gishu district and to Teachers Advisory Centres serving primary schools in order to collect sufficient in-depth information or data to make it possible to conduct a thorough analysis and evaluation of the modality.
One other problem encountered during the course of the study was the lack of statistical data for analytical purposes. TAC tutors hardly kept any records, for example the number of users over a given period of time, number of books borrowed, and so forth. In some cases this problem was overcome by taking statistics over a two week period and extrapolating the findings in order to obtain a reasonable estimate covering a longer period.
Collection development
Data analysis was conducted in order to assess the sufficiency and relevance of the available stock, to identify the selection/acquisition practices employed by the TACs, and to find out the ways in which the collections were organized. Both quantitative and qualitative means were employed to analyze the data.
It is regrettable that although one of the main functions of the Teachers Advisory Centres was to provide convenient and appropriately equipped centres for updating teachers and to act as receiving and distributing centres for various educational resource materials, data analysis revealed that not one of the TACs studied had sufficient relevant educational materials for the school population that it was meant to serve. Throughout the Uasin Gishu district where this study was conducted, Teachers Advisory Centres appear to be in a state of crisis and this researcher believes that TACs are actually in decline throughout the country. The school population are completely unable to have their information needs fully met by the TACs or Learning Resource Centres in the country.
A typical response given by the teachers in interviews in reply to the question about the sufficiency and relevance of educational materials in the TACs started with the following phrase:
'The materials are not sufficient and are irrelevant to my needs...'
Each TAC had an average of about 800 educational items only, including books, maps and wall charts. The only TAC which had a total stock of more than 1000 items had received aid in the form of book donations from DFID. The books comprised English story books, but these were obviously inadequate in view of the fact that the TAC was meant to serve about 500 teachers.
The subject coverage of the collections available left a lot to be desired. None of the TACs possessed a comprehensive stock to cover all the primary school curriculum subjects. Most of the TACs had reasonably good collections of atlases and wall charts for geography, history and civics, but they all had inadequate stock in other subjects such as science, mathematics, art, craft and music.
Although local subject panels had been established at zonal level to assist TAC tutors in the selection and acquisition of educational materials as recommended by the Primary Teacher Updating Committee of 1978, the subject panels had become dormant in five out of the six zones in which this study was conducted. It was however, encouraging to note that in one zone where some subject panels were proactive the teachers were involved in the preparation and selection of educational materials for their TAC.
Collection development was generally not well organized and, in actual fact, none of the TACs had a well formulated and regularly reviewed collection development policy that would guide the development of their stock. There was no attempt, for example, to review the existing state of affairs, review relative strengths and weaknesses, consider environmental influences and other current trends, set goals and design strategies to reach those goals.
Staffing
Although the Primary Teacher Updating Programme Committee recommended that staff of TACs be increased, this study found that the recommendation had not been implemented. Every TAC is run by only one tutor, who opens the TAC only two days in a week on average and spends the rest of the days in the field visiting schools to meet and discuss teaching methods, curriculum and other educational matters with teachers. All the teachers who were interviewed underlined the need for TAC staffing to be increased so that the TAC could be open throughout the week. The practice of keeping the TACs closed during the time when the TAC tutor was away in the field was a major discouraging factor to teachers in visiting and accessing educational materials in the TACs. A typical statement which was recorded in several interviews with the teachers was as follows:
'... The TAC is rarely open since the tutor is never around whenever I visit the TAC. I think he spends all his time in the field. I have ceased to use it.'
It is the inadequate staffing leading to very irregular opening which has discouraged many teachers from visiting the resource centres. The problem of irregular opening hours was aggravated by a lack of records and publicity on what information resources are available; even those centres which have benefited from donor aid continue to be shunned by teachers, who still see TACs as unimportant channels for accessing educational materials.
TAC staffing needs to be increased and staff need to develop attributes that will make them be seen by teachers as dependable providers of useful educational materials.
TAC tutors' qualifications range from P2 to SI grade, since the posts are localized and take into account environmental knowledge. For example, a teacher with P2 certificate with a wealth of knowledge about Narok district in Maasailand may be preferred for appointment as a TAC tutor in Narok to an SI teacher with a higher academic qualification but little local knowledge of Narok district.
Teachers who are appointed TAC tutors are recommended by their District Education Officers assisted by the District Primary School Inspectors who pass the recommendation to the Chief Inspector of Schools through the Provincial Education Officers, who must also be satisfied that the persons nominated for appointment as TAC tutors are suitable candidates for appointment based on their performance as teachers. However, apart from the training one receives as a teacher, there is no additional training to make one a TAC tutor, and many teachers felt that some TAC tutors were not performing their duties effectively, because they lacked the necessary training. This is probably true since TAC tutors did not, in particular, possess good skills in collecting, organizing educational materials and disseminating information to the school population that they were appointed to serve, the sort of skills normally acquired through training in library and information studies rather than in teacher training.
Moreover, the level of information consciousness was not high enough among the TAC tutors who were interviewed. Information consciousness refers to the value that the TAC tutors placed on information as a resource. Their low level of information consciousness was best exemplified by their lukewarm support and encouragement for the exploitation of information resources by teachers from the collection that they had in their TACs. The low level of information consciousness among the TAC tutors was manifested in a rich diversity of ways: the practice of keeping educational materials locked up in cabinets; the complete lack of information retrieval tools; the habit of keeping the TACs closed several days in a week; and the failure to make any attempt to assess the information needs of the school population that they were meant to serve. There was, however, some variation among individual TAC tutors with regard to level of information consciousness.
Physical facilities
Physical facilities were generally poor in all the TACs. The limited educational materials were housed in small rooms, some of which also served as offices of zonal inspectors of schools. Some centres were originally classrooms, which had been converted into Teachers Advisory Centres.
Since most teachers used the TACs very rarely, not many of them saw the poor physical facilities as a major problem. They did not seem to bother or complain about the few old and dusty reading tables and chairs commonly found in many TACs. Whenever the teachers visited TACs, they appeared to be preoccupied with identifying the needed items and had no time to think about the poor state of the physical facilities.
None of the TACs visited had proper shelving facilities. Books and other educational materials were kept in boxes or locked up in cabinets which were opened only when items were required by a user. The materials were not maintained in open access stacks, where they could be freely consulted.
Finance
Teachers Advisory Centres require both capital and recurrent expenditure. Recurrent expenditure covers salaries of the centre tutors, travelling and subsistence costs, consumables and contingencies. Capital funds are used for the purchase of equipment, furniture and resource materials like books.
TACs, as providers of educational materials, are actually not sustainable at the moment. They arc dependent on such donations as are given. Their decline has been most acute over the last decade.
For the past ten years the Kenyan economy has been declining and inflation combined with recession has produced higher prices for educational materials in general and books in particular. This has caused severe problems for the country's educational resource centres, including libraries, which are squeezed from two directions: their sources of revenue have been drying up while costs of reading materials have continued to increase. Acquisition budgets have been particularly severely affected and most of the TACs do not get any funds from the government for the purchase of educational materials.
Several TAC tutors reported that they had not received any funds for purchasing any educational materials for the last five to six years. The only form of funding that they have received has been in the form of their monthly salaries. The only TACs which have received reading materials in the recent past are those which have benefited from DFID donations.
Use
Data analysis revealed that 75% of the teachers interviewed had visited their zonal or district TAC at least once, but that 40% of this group of teachers who had visited TACs had ceased to use them.
Four major reasons were identified for visits to TACs by the teachers who participated in this study. These were:
· attend seminars or workshops organized by the TAC tutor to receive updates in teaching methods;· represent their schools on zonal examination panels in their respective subjects especially for purposes of examination moderation;
· participate in the preparation of teaching aids in their subject areas;
· access educational materials in their respective subjects.
It was interesting to note that although the provision of access to educational materials to the school population was one of the main functions of TACs, only 20% of the teachers who were interviewed cited access to educational materials as the main reason for visiting TACs.
TACs hardly gave out any materials on loan to their user communities. The inadequate materials stocked were restricted to reference use.
This study found that, although the provision of access to education materials and information services were central to the mission of TACs, they had shifted away from this mission and were more involved in examination matters at the expense of information services. It was therefore not surprising to find that none of the TACs studied offered any education programme to their users in the use of informational materials in education.
This researcher found out that many teachers used the main public library in Eldoret to access a wide variety of reading materials. Many respondents reported that since their zonal TAC had very little or nothing to offer in terms of supplementary reading material, they saw the public library as the only source of educational materials not available in their own schools. Teachers in private schools reported that they turned to their school library for supplementary reading materials. These teachers hardly visited TACs since they were convinced that their own school library was far better stocked than TACs in terms of educational materials. Whereas teachers in government schools, most of which did not have school libraries, relied on the public library for educational materials, those in private schools relied on their own school libraries. It was clear that Teachers Advisory Centres were not important sources of supplementary educational materials to the school population.
Costs and cost-effectiveness
Good information should be cost effective, that is, the value of the information should be more than the cost of acquiring it. Cost is therefore an important consideration in the provision of information services. However, it is important to bear in mind that information services are not easily tangible or measurable and it is difficult to express them in monetary terms.
It is, nevertheless, important to understand the structure of the costs that are related to the provision of information products or services. This structure comprise the following elements:
· direct costs (materials equipment, consumables, salaries);
· indirect costs (overheads/training, management/supervision, building costs, central charges).
These costs may be:
· fixed costs (do not change with volume of use);
· variable costs (dependent on number of activities undertaken or vary according to usage).
If the above cost elements are known, it is possible to work out the total costs of an information service by applying a standard costing formula:
Total Costs = Direct Costs + Indirect Costs
It is regrettable that in this study it was not possible to work out meaningful direct and indirect costs, since most of the Teachers Advisory Centres studied had not received any information resources in the last six years. Most actually were dormant and stocked with a few old and outdated books acquired about a whole decade back. It was difficult for this researcher to conduct any useful costing of the services of the TACs in their current state since apart from staff salaries the other cost elements could not be ascertained. That said, the costs of providing reading materials would be low, as only part of the time of the TAC tutor was utilized, existing buildings provided the premises and materials were received on donation rather than purchased.
Yet, however low the costs, cost-effectiveness was even lower. As revealed in this study, teachers who used Teachers Advisory Centres were dissatisfied with the services offered by the centres, especially with regard to the provision of educational materials. The dissatisfaction trait was indeed discerned on a wide scale in the data collected in all the interviews with the teachers. The existing collections of educational materials in the centres seem to be inappropriate and incapable of meeting the needs of teachers because they are not only inadequate and dated but are also inaccessible due to long distances from schools and frequent closures of the centres whenever TAC tutors go out to the field to visit teachers at their work stations.
Effectiveness
This study has established that, despite all the good intentions that the Kenya government had when they established Teachers Advisory Centres, the latter have turned out to be completely ineffective in providing accessibility to current and useful educational materials to the school population. The only supplementary reading materials that have been acquired have come as donations mainly from DFID but these are barely adequate. Other materials commonly found in TACs include a few charts, maps and syllabuses which are already stocked by most schools.
TACs have suffered several years of neglect and have been in steady decline over the last decade to the extent that they have become marginalized. Moreover, remoteness seems to isolate most teachers (potential users) from their zonal resource centres, especially since the poor public transport and communications system makes it difficult for many teachers to visit the resource centres to use educational materials. It was clear from the data collected in the study that long distances coupled with poor public transport facilities discouraged many teachers from visiting the centres. Schools do not have their own buses and neither do they have funds to transport teachers to the resource centres. Moreover, those teachers, who made their own effort and used their own means of transport to get to the resource centres, were on many occasions disappointed to find the TACs either closed with the TAC tutor out in the field, or open but without the needed educational materials.
Impact
Dissatisfaction with the services of the resource centres, essentially stemming from a combination of poorly managed services, long distances from their work stations (schools), poor public transport system and a lack of suitable supplementary educational materials, made all teachers who were interviewed in this study to report that the TACs had made very little or no impact on the education process among their pupils. None of the teachers believed that the establishment of a TAC in their zone had had any bearing on examination pass rates, drop-out and repetition rates or improved pupil learning, as evidenced by better reading skills or better critical abilities. Some of the teachers asserted that it would make no difference in their pupils' education process if their local TAC was closed down since it was serving no useful purpose especially with regard to the provision of educational materials.
Teachers Advisory Centres, as resource centres, were meant to provide accessibility to educational materials; but this role has been neglected in Kenya. It is most unfortunate that the importance of the centres as sources of a wide variety of reading materials has been overlooked for quite some time and, regrettably, there are no signs of any changes in the current state of affairs at the moment or in the near future. The centres have therefore been of little benefit to the school population and have been ineffective in serving them.
Such centres have been ineffective in pursuance of their main functions in accordance with their mission and have resorted to performing peripheral functions such as co-ordinating zonal examinations.
Future of TACs
An evaluation of the numerous physical, psychological and other barriers to the use of Teachers Advisory Centres that have prevented them from providing effective information services to the school population shows that many of the constraints cannot be easily alleviated or avoided.
There is a need, for example, to develop the transport and communications and the information infrastructure for improved access to information and for the availability of information at the right time and in an appropriate form. It is also clear from the findings of this study that Learning Resource Centre staff, commonly referred to as TAC tutors, require extensive training in communication and interpersonal skills, collection development, organization of resources and information dissémination in order to play an effective role in serving the school population. TAC tutors need to set standards of performance for themselves and to create an atmosphere of cordiality to motivate teachers to use their centres. Good human relations between TAC tutors and teachers is a prerequisite for good user/staff relations.
Another important consideration for TAC tutors must be the evaluation of their collections and services and their relevance to the needs of the school population. This implies that needs must first be known and understood before they can be met. However, many past studies have recognized the fact that ascertaining information needs is not a simple matter. To be able to design appropriate information systems for the school population, TAC staff need to conduct qualitative user studies research aimed at gathering information on the knowledge and skills required to improve the communication process among the various members of the school population.
For TACs to provide a more effective service, staff must be prepared at all times to offer user-centred and user-friendly service to the school population. They should be concerned with 'customer care' and should give adequate publicity to the facilities and services offered by the centre, since resources and services which are not known will not be used. TAC tutors should use modem marketing strategies in putting their message across to the school population.
In view of the prevailing economic hardships in the country it is highly unlikely that the above measures will be taken now or in the near future to salvage the deterioration of the provision of information resources by TACs to the school population. Future prospects offer little comfort; indeed, present projections suggest that the part played by TACs in providing educational materials to the school population in the country will be further undermined.
Future strategies on school level information provision
This study was conducted in one district but the picture is more or less the same all over the country. It is clear that teachers resource centres or learning resource centres have not proved to be either cost-effective or effective in providing educational materials to the school population in Kenya.
There is, therefore, a need to devise new strategies on school level information provision. This author believes that providing teachers with relevant resources in their own school libraries is likely to make the resources more accessible and this will lead to greater use of the resources, improve lesson presentation and contribute to a better pass rate of pupils. Moreover, school library resources accessed and used by pupils themselves will promote independent learning and inculcate a reading habit in the pupils. Pupils will be enabled to gain knowledge of the sources of information and develop the skills needed to retrieve and use information. Teachers Advisory Centres should continue to play the role of arranging and offering in-service training to teachers especially in modem teaching methods but should leave information provision role to a more effective modality.
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