How schools can speed up registration of students

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

08 August 2021

I spent 7 hours on Monday getting a child registered in Form 1 at a secondary school. When I shared this on Twitter, other people came out saying that they had similar experiences but, for much longer – up to 13 hours queuing!

When I was going to Form 1, 40 years ago, it took only two hours to register the entire class of about 150 pupils – it was all done by the time of the first toilet break! Later, when I joined A-Levels, I didn’t even find a queue at the registration office and I was done in about 15 minutes.

One of the people who responded to my tweet said that he took just 90 minutes and, after that, there was no queue and people were registered individually on arrival. Each took about 15 minutes.

How is it that some schools are able to speed up the registration process while others are not? It is not the difference in number of pupils to be registered: the school where I was on Monday had 200 newcomers. My school from 4 decades ago had 150. Clearly, the extra 50 cannot be responsible for increasing the registration duration from 2h to 7h.

The answer is in the method used by the school. At my old school, we were all directed to our respective classrooms on arrival. Then the class teachers went in to their respective rooms and carried out the entire process singly. It wasn’t too much workload since each classroom had 35 pupils.

At the new school on Monday, the process was broken down into seven steps and there was a different desk for each step. A kind of cafeteria / buffet serving system. Even though this seems like a good way to speed up the service, in reality it really slows things down.

The problem is that, if there is a delay in one of the steps, it clogs the whole stream and work comes to a standstill. Much the same way a speed bump on a highway causes a traffic jam even though cars don’t actually stop when going over it.

Although they are efficient and fast in manufacturing, assembly line systems simply don’t work in service delivery. Look around and you will notice that every place where service is delivered by different people in a continuous series of steps, it tends to be slow and bureaucratic.