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Pamela Shumba Senior Reporter
THE Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has embarked on a countrywide schools inspection programme to ensure quality and public accountability in the education system.Lazarus Dokora, the Minister of Primary and Secondary Education told Chronicle yesterday that his office was picking schools randomly and evaluating if they were following the ministry’s rules and regulations when conducting their work.

He said some schools in Harare, Mashonaland East and Mashonaland West have already been subjected to the surprise assessments while other provinces would be covered in the coming weeks.

“We are conducting inspections in schools and centres for education around the country. The programme is meant to assess the quality of    education at the schools and give advice in terms of how they can improve their operations,” said Minister Dokora.

“As we try to promote best practices in our schools and improve their performances, our programme will focus on fees, expenditure, enrolment, teacher supervision and income-generating projects.”

He said the assessment of a few schools in the different provinces will give the ministry a picture of how school heads are running the schools.

“We’re randomly picking schools and no warnings are being given to school authorities because we don’t want to get an artificial but a real picture of the situation.

“From the schools that we have visited so far, we have gathered that some are in the right track while some are not due to certain challenges,” said the minister.

He announced last year that the government was working on revising regulations for supervising the country’s school heads in a bid to clip their wings.

The minister said the statutory instrument in place was enacted in 1983 and gives school heads excess power, a development that he said was negatively affecting the education sector.

Some school heads have accused Minister Dokora of causing confusion in schools through a raft of policy changes.