Rule on school choices criticised

Standard Eight candidates should be allowed to revise their choice of secondary schools as soon as KCPE results are released, high school principals have proposed.

The Kenya Secondary Schools Heads Association (KSSHA) on Tuesday said this would ensure that the pupils who scored high marks were not locked out of competitive national and provincial schools. Candidates select the schools of their choice way before sitting KCPE at the end of the year. “There are many pupils who will today (Wednesday) miss the top schools even though they scored well,” said KSSHA chairman Cleophas Tirop.

The selection process, which has since been computerised, considers the marks a candidate scored and the schools they had chosen. Mr Tirop said provincial schools countrywide were expected to open their doors to 129,287 pupils on Wednesday. It is not clear why the exercise was delayed for two days contrary to announcement by Education minister Sam Ongeri, but public relations officer Virginia Wangari said the delay was occasioned by the principals.

Eighty five per cent of the students will be drawn from the province where the school is located, with the majority (60 per cent) coming from the district. A provincial school will only be allowed to pick a paltry 15 per cent outside its mother province, under a slightly modified quota system.

The Education ministry yesterday said it had issued new guidelines on selection of pupils to join the schools. “Because of the slight changes that have been made in the selection criteria, the principals had requested more time to understand the process,” Ms Wangari said.

And since the newly created district had become a headache, officers resorted to the original criterion, where the larger districts will hurl a 60 per cent majority to the provincial schools.

Scored well

“But still there will be many parents running up and down, after their children fail to be picked although they scored better than others already in (the top schools),” Mr Tirop added. The problem, he said, was failure by the Education ministry to allow the pupils review their choice of schools, before the final selection is done.

The new selection process would therefore consider the number of pupils who have applied for a certain school, and the cut-off point. To make the work of the parents and the candidates easier, the ministry is to make available all information necessary to them. “This way, a lot of speculations on the exercise would be reduced.”

If adopted, this practice would be akin to one where Form Four students through the Joint Admissions Board revise their degree programmes at a university of their choice before the final admission is done. Said Mr Tirop: “In such an event the slots in the national schools would be left to the deserving students only.”

District schools will later receive the bulk of the admissions with 301,682 pupils, whereas the private schools will have 51,308 pupils this year. But since the top schools have remained few for a long time now, KSSHA wants the government to convert the centres of excellence - whose construction is under way in all constituencies - into national and top provincial secondary schools.

Under a grand economic stimulus plan unveiled last year, Finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta has already allocated Sh30 million for each constituency to upgrade an existing school into a centre of excellence.

New schools

Others will build new schools – estimated at 55 centres. “This project should thus be geared to bringing top schools with modern facilities into the rural areas as well,” said Mr Tirop. Mr Tirop argued that is such a plan is unveiled, the current quota system would not be self-defeating. “We will have enough schools to send all deserving candidates, instead of fighting for a few slots in the urban and municipal areas only.”

At the end of the project, the number of top school would shoot to 210. Currently, there are only 18 national schools. “It is not possible to accommodate every pupil in these schools even if they scored well,” he added.