Disquiet over delayed Form One selection
Education CS George Magoha (right) and Absa Bank Kenya boss Jeremy Awori during the handover of bags and masks at the Joseph Kangethe Primary School in Nairobi on May 24, 2021.
Last year’s Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) candidates will have to wait longer to know the secondary schools they will join after the government pushed back the announcement by two weeks.
The 1,179,192 learners and their families had been eagerly waiting for results of Form One selection this Friday, as promised by Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha on April 15.
But yesterday, Prof Magoha dashed their hopes, saying he would instead give the report on June 15, exactly two months after the release of KCPE exam results on April 15. Prof Magoha did not give reasons for the delay.
“I wish to stress that all the candidates who sat the examination will find places in secondary schools in the spirit of our 100 percent transition policy,” he said in Nairobi.
He spoke at Joseph Kang’ethe Primary School in Dagoretti during the handover of 4,000 school bags and 20,000 face masks donated by Absa Bank.
Placement
“We’re disappointed. We have been waiting for the placement so that we may plan our next move,” Ms Catherine Muthoka, a parent from Nairobi, said.
A team of technocrats from the Education ministry has been working on the selection in Naivasha. It was tasked with looking at available vacancies in Form One and determining whether schools have the necessary infrastructure.
The ministry places candidates based on their performance, availability of vacancies and the choices they made when they registered for the exams.
It is a computerised process that Prof Magoha said will be “water-tight, credible and of high integrity”.
The students will join Form One in July when the Term One of the reorganised calendar begins.
Candidates are allowed to select four national schools. The ministry places the top five candidates of each gender from each county in the national schools they chose. In addition, the learners then select three extra-county schools and two county and sub-county schools each.
103 national schools
The capacity of the schools is a factor in addition to the overall performance in the counties the learners come from. There are 103 national schools, 531 extra county, 1,031 county, 7,325 sub-county and 1,164 private high schools. During the previous selection exercise, national schools had declared 29,712 slots, extra county (123,399), county (142,358), and sub-county schools (685,590).
In addition, private secondary schools have a capacity to take 69,880 students. There are 32 special needs secondary schools with a capacity of 1,453 students.
Education stakeholders have expressed concerns that many of the KCPE candidates might fail to report to Form One in July.
“We must protect all the candidates as they are prepared to join Form One in July,” Prof Magoha said. “We must ward off all forms of child abuse, which could prevent the learners from joining Form One,” he added.
The learners are expected to report to school in the last week of July when the first term of the 2021 academic year will begin.
The term will be covered in only 10 weeks followed by a one-week break before the second term begins on October 11 2021.
The term will run until December 23. Schools will open for Third Term on January 3 and close on March 4, 2022.
