If you look at the secondary school landscape now, more than 70 per cent of the students in secondary school are boarders.
I think around 73 per cent attend the schools, and so when we talk about boarding it turns out like it's a national crisis.
But, actually, we have already moved quite a lot.
The only remaining bit, and this is what brings a lot of tension for secondary schools, is that all the best secondary schools with infrastructure are the national schools.
Those good schools are all boarding, so the big question is if Alliance High School became a day school what happens is it becomes a Kikuyu school just around the Thogoto area.
First, there should be commitment by government to make quality of education everywhere equitable.
And so over time government has favoured some schools at the expense of others.
And this is the time to reverse this cycle. So if the day schools became as good as as Alliance High School in terms of infrastructure, that's the ideal situation.
The second point is that boarding school is important for some cluster of the population.
Here we talk about, for instance, students who have severe disability who cannot walk from home to school everyday.
The second category are those children especially in the arid areas, where the school is 10 or even 20km from home.
It is not practical, unless we are providing transport for students going and coming back. And this affects the entire Northern of Kenya; it affects maybe more than 20 counties where these sparsely populated places.
Boarding facilities have a rescue centre for girls or orphans who don't have a place to stay.
So, boarding ought to be limited to these circumstances. It will become an exception and applies to those contexts, rather than being the norm: because the norm is that children ought to grow with their parents.
In boarding we replace parenting for a teacher who has 50 students in one class. That cannot be the parent.
Parental engagement in learning has really been weakened by keeping our children in boarding schools.
Writer is executive director Zizi Afrique Foundation