By Adonis Byemelwa
What was to be a normal school term was interrupted by a phone call from Misenyi District in Kagera Region. My granddaughter is a Form Two student in a public day school and was sent away when her family refused to pay about Sh120,000 a month for a compulsory examination camp.
The school has no dormitories. Instead, students were expected to sleep in classrooms that had been turned into makeshift hostels as they prepared for end-of-year examinations. The family said no, citing concerns about hygiene, privacy and safety, especially for the girls.
Relatives say school officials responded by telling the child not to come back. The family has since sought legal advice, contending that a public day school cannot lawfully mandate boarding arrangements in the name of academic preparation.
The row goes far beyond one family in north-western Tanzania. This is indicative of a growing trend in both state and private schools where parents are increasingly claiming that they are being asked to pay for compulsory examination camps, special meals, extra tuition, mock exams and other programmes that are not covered by the official school fees.
The academic support that was once an extra service is slowly evolving into a parallel education economy, almost totally financed by households. The irony is undeniable. In 2016, Tanzania introduced its flagship Fee-Free Basic Education Policy, greatly improving access to schooling through the removal of tuition fees for public primary and lower secondary education.
The government says Tanzania has one of the largest public education systems in sub-Saharan Africa, with over 12 million learners now enrolled in basic education. But with tuition gone, many families say a growing list of unofficial charges has quietly taken its place.
The stakes nationally are huge. Statistics from the National Examinations Council of Tanzania (NECTA) show that hundreds of thousands of candidates sit for the Form Four Certificate of Secondary Education Examination every year, while over one million pupils sit the Primary School Leaving Examination.
For many young Tanzanians, these examinations determine progression to Higher Level education, technical colleges, vocational institutions and eventually, universities. Schools understand the importance attached to these examinations and so do parents.
This common ground has been fertile ground for a burgeoning market in exam preparation. Parents across the country are reporting increasing requests for revision camps, residential coaching, ‘special diets’, mock exams with neighbouring schools, transport levies and a host of other contributions just months before national exams.
Almost no family can afford to say no. The fear is that, at the most crucial stage of their education, their children could be excluded, disadvantaged or labelled as lacking in commitment.
One parent in Shinyanga Region recently found himself in just such a predicament. A private school has told parents that starting September 2026, all Standard Six pupils will be required to attend an exam camp at a cost of Sh590,000 on top of the normal term fee of approximately Sh425,000.
School administrators said the programme was necessary to equip students for the Primary School Leaving Examination. Parents, however, questioned why an additional term of fees was necessary when the whole national curriculum had been covered in the usual classroom teaching.
Such worries are not merely about affordability. Increasingly, parents are questioning whether mandatory camps really enhance learning or simply transfer the burden of operational costs from schools to families.
Education specialists have long argued that continuous, quality teaching throughout the academic year is preferable to intensive short-term examination drilling, particularly when it is combined with adequate teaching materials, manageable class sizes and well-trained teachers.
That wider educational philosophy appears to be supported by government policy. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology also banned boarding services for nursery pupils and children in Standards One to Four through Education Circular No. 2 of 2023.
The circular says young children should stay in families to foster emotional development, preserve family ties and decrease excessive pressure from school. Schools offering unauthorised boarding facilities may be subject to disciplinary action, including withdrawal of registration.
The directive also expressed concern over the culture of examination camps and highly pressurised learning environments. “Education should develop the whole child, not just examination performance,” officials said.
Despite the clarity of the regulations, complaints about compulsory camps and long residential revision programmes continue to emerge from various parts of the country, raising questions about the consistency of enforcement.
An increasing number of parents and education advocates say policy has outstripped implementation. Although the Ministry has issued explicit orders, few enforcement actions have been publicly reported.
This disconnect between regulation and practice has contributed to the public perception that some institutions operate with a high degree of confidence that sanctions are unlikely. That impression, whether or not it is true, is damaging to confidence in educational governance.
But private school owners are another story. They say costs associated with running the business, like inflation, utility bills, staff salaries and maintenance of learning technologies and infrastructure, have skyrocketed in recent years.
Taxation, compliance costs and the need to stay competitive in terms of examination results in an increasingly competitive education market are also cited by many institutions. They say the added costs are usually a response to real financial pressure rather than an effort to take advantage of parents.
Both realities can be true at the same time. Schools must have enough resources to maintain quality education; there is no question. Until now, parents are equally entitled to know what the actual official tuition fees cover and what additional contributions are genuinely voluntary.
There are no consistent national guidelines on examination camps and supplementary fees, which leaves schools, parents and local authorities in a regulatory grey area.
This uncertainty extends to public education. In the last few years, more public primary schools have started English-medium streams, where parents have to pay extra fees despite being run under the government’s fee-free education programme.
A peer-reviewed research study recently published in Cogent Education studied this emerging phenomenon and concluded that it is a reflection of deeper structural pressures within Tanzania’s education system rather than isolated local decisions.
The researchers found that English medium education requires substantially more investment than the traditional Kiswahili medium education. Schools need specialised textbooks, continuous teacher professional development, updated teaching materials and better-equipped classrooms.
English-medium public schools have no specific national funding framework, and therefore administrators rely more on parental contributions to sustain these programmes.
The result is two separate tracks in the same public education system that develop slowly. One is tuition-free and largely in the Kiswahili language. The other offers instruction in English but asks parents to make financial contributions. Access to better language instruction is thus more dependent on household income than on educational entitlement.
English is still the language of higher education, worldwide business and many professional occupations. It’s a gateway to better chances, so, understandably, parents shell out the extra.
Nonetheless, experts say fee-paying English-medium public schools could worsen inequality by drawing better teachers, more investment and greater parental support, leaving Kiswahili-medium schools behind.
Misenyi’s case illustrates this larger problem. Fee-free education has resulted in increased enrolment, but the promise of this is gradually being eroded by hidden costs such as mandatory examination camps, revision fees and parental contributions.
“These costs continue to constitute major barriers to equal education,” UNESCO says. “Every classroom must be a place of learning, not sleeping; and every child must succeed on merit, not family income. This requires adequate public funding, transparent regulation and accountable fee structures.
