Client Context

Education is Kenya's largest public expenditure category. The Teachers Service Commission employs over 370,000 teachers, manages the largest payroll in the public sector, and is responsible for one of the most consequential resource allocation decisions any government agency makes: which schools get teachers, how many, and in what subjects.

For decades, those decisions were made on the basis of criteria that were administratively convenient but educationally questionable. School registration numbers, historical precedent, and political visibility shaped teacher deployment at least as much as actual learning need. The consequences were predictable and well-documented. Schools in Nairobi's wealthier suburbs were generously staffed. Schools in Turkana, Marsabit, and Mandera, where learning deficits were deepest and alternatives fewest, operated with chronic shortfalls in qualified teachers. The national student-teacher ratio looked acceptable in aggregate. At the school level, the distribution told a different story.

The World Bank's education programme in Kenya identified teacher deployment reform as a priority precisely because the misallocation was structural rather than incidental. No amount of increased education spending would produce proportional learning outcomes improvements if the additional resources were distributed through the same distorted allocation system. What Kenya needed was a new framework for deciding how teachers should be deployed, one grounded in evidence about where teachers were needed rather than administrative inertia about where they had always been.

ACAL was the firm the World Bank and TSC trusted to develop it.

The Challenge

Developing staffing norms for a national school system is not a technical exercise that can be completed in an office. It requires primary data on school-level enrolment, student-teacher ratios, subject availability, infrastructure capacity, and learning outcomes across the full geographic diversity of Kenya's education system. It requires engagement with TSC administrators, school principals, county education officials, and community stakeholders whose cooperation is necessary both for data quality and for the political legitimacy that any new framework will need to be adopted and sustained.

It also requires a clear theory of what staffing norms are for. If the purpose of the framework is to produce equitable distribution of teachers across schools with similar enrolment, the design logic is one thing. If the purpose is to deploy teachers where learning outcomes gaps are greatest, the logic is different. If the purpose is to ensure minimum subject coverage in every school regardless of size, the logic is different again. Getting clarity on the purpose before designing the norms was as important as the technical work of developing the formula.

Beyond the design challenge was the institutionalisation challenge. Kenya has a history of producing technically credible policy frameworks that sit in government archives rather than shaping operational decisions. A staffing norms framework that TSC field administrators did not understand, trust, or have the tools to apply would not change how teachers were deployed regardless of its technical quality. The engagement had to produce both a defensible methodology and an institutional adoption pathway.

Our Approach

ACAL designed the engagement around a core principle: the staffing norms framework had to be built from evidence about Kenya's actual school system, not adapted from generic international benchmarks that did not account for Kenya's geographic diversity, subject-specific teaching shortages, or the specific characteristics of ASAL schools. The approach combined primary data collection at scale with structured stakeholder engagement and a methodology transparent enough to be understood, applied, and defended by TSC beyond the life of the consultancy.