Bench marking and performance in public secondary schools in Nairobi Province

Abstract

The major purpose of this study was to document the extent to which secondary schools use benchmarking and establish whether those that use benchmarking have realized improved performance in KCSE. To achieve this purpose, a survey was done to collect both primary and secondary data. A sample of thirty five (35) secondary schools was randomly selected. Thirty one (31) secondary schools responded, a very high response rate of 86 percent. The study was carried out in Nairobi Province. The data was collected using questionnaires administered to deputy head teachers and deans of studies of the participating schools. Analysis was done using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) and presented in the form of percentages, means and frequencies. The study revealed that most secondary schools practice benchmarking to a very large extent in areas such as discipline, parental involvement, motivation, leadership, teaching and learning resources. The major drive of adopting best practices from high performing schools is to: improve performance, create a culture based on improved performance outcomes, inject best practices into the operations of a school, get the best out of staff, processes and programmes and lastly provide quality education. The three most critical factors influencing the choice of benchmarking tools are: the objectives to be achieved, time and resources available and compatibility with local conditions and the school's processes. The research further established that schools that use benchmarking have realized improved performance. The performance has been improving from 0.1 points to one point over the last six years (from 5.633 to 6.379). The correlation coefficient between the extent of benchmarking and improved performance in KCSE is -.647. There is a strong positive correlation of approximately 0.96. The significance is under 0.05 (.003). This indicates that benchmarking is an important tool in realizing improved performance. The researcher recommends that school managers should consider the objectives to be achieved, time and resources available and compatibility of best practices to a school's processes before embarking on a benchmarking exercise. Parents should also cooperate and support school programmes. The Ministry of Education should come up with a formal structure, which could assist school managers to systematically and continuously adopt best practices from high performing schools. This will eventually lead to improved performance of students in national examinations. For further research, the researcher recommends a similar study should be conducted in other companies outside the education sector to determine the extent of using benchmarking as a performance improvement tool. This study was done in one province. There is need to replicate the study in other provinces in Kenya. Future studies could include other factors that affect performance other than benchmarking.