Teacher qualifications and experience in devolved management of early childhood education to the county Government

Abstract

The Kenya 2010 Constitution placed management and financing of Early Years’ Education (EYE) under custody of County Governments. As such management and efficiency of early childhood education is expected to be more effective in offering quality ECDE in the counties than it was before devolution. This study emerges from the theoretical perspective that increased inputs should lead to increased outputs. Consequently, the Education Production Function (EPF) theory was employed. The objective of this comparative study was to compare teacher qualification and experience and how these teacher factors could influence learning and achievement of pupils in public and private ECDE centres in the context of increased funding to public ECDE centres. Kericho County with a target population of 1,066 teachers and 18,405 pupils in public ECDE centres as well as all the 628 teachers and 4,180 pupils drawn from 750 public and 258 private ECDE centres was selected for the study. Pupils in Pre-Primary 2 (PP 2) were used in the study. Sampling was done through stratified, purposive and simple random sampling methods. The sample size was determined by adopting the