Journal of Education and e-Learning Research

Private tuition refers to tutoring offered outside mainstream teaching. The study sought to establish the difference in prevalence for private tuition among parents, teachers and pupils in public primary schools in Machakos County. The study employed descriptive survey design. The target populations were all teachers, parents and pupils of public primary schools in Machakos County. A total of 405 respondents were sampled for the study and comprised of 27 parents, 27 teachers and 351 pupils. Data was collected by use of questionnaires and interview guide. Descriptive as well as inferential statistics were used to analyze data and results presented in tables showing frequency, standard deviations and means. The hypothesis was tested using ANOVA which showed the tuition mean prevalence between groups as 1.457 and within groups as 0.056. The post hoc analysis was done using the Scheffe test and the mean difference between teachers and pupils gave a mean of 0.228 and between pupils and parents gave a mean of 0.260. The findings indicate that private tuition is still being offered despite the government ban and that the main reasons given for engagement in holiday tuition include desire to get high marks, stiff competition for placement into particular secondary schools, inadequate teacher pupil ratio and as a way of earning extra income by teachers. The study recommends that the government remunerates teachers adequately and to have other measures of rewarding performance other than academics. The study also recommends that the government needs to improve infrastructure in all secondary schools to minimize the stiff competition for those schools perceived to be prestigious. In addition, there should be stakeholders’ awareness of other ways of engaging pupils constructively during their free time other than in private tuition.