Hope 4 Africa Blog

2 out of 3 students in Kenya have no chance of joining College/University

Many district schools have never sent a student to university

Published on Jan 12 2010 by Wachira Kigotho

Forget about the 241,121 pupils whose hopes of further education were shattered for not getting enough marks to enable them gain admission to secondary schools and think of the 485,933 who are now celebrating together with their parents for a job well done.

“These are hard times but have a beer, you know my son Kiragu missed national school by a whisker. He was number two in his class”, a friend told me over the weekend. But when later I called the primary school where Kiragu was attending, the headmistress told me, the best student had 352 marks while Kiragu had 349 marks. This would be enough to have him selected to join Form One in a district public school.

Celebrating Parents

Kiragu will be among 353,000 candidates that last year sat KCPE who will be joining district public and low cost private schools across the country. But very few of those children or their celebrating parents are aware that most public and low-cost secondary schools are nothing but academic slums.

Over the years little has been done to improve learning facilities in those schools. Classrooms are in a state of disrepair, laboratories are ill equipped and core-textbooks are shared among students. The situation of students’ access to core textbooks and other learning resources is critical in low-cost secondary schools, which are some of the worst ranked schools in performance in the KCSE.

Education wastage

Dr Maurice Amutabi, an assistant professor at Central Washington University, says low-cost private secondary schools are merchants of education wastage. “Low-cost private secondary schools are perhaps the worst and saddest thing ever to happen to the education sector, says Dr Amutabi. Most of the schools lack the necessary learning facilities and quite often are located in backstreets in urban areas. “Learners are crammed and squeezed in poorly ventilated and poor lit rooms in the name of schools,” says Dr Amutabi, a former educational researcher at Moi University. Above all, they are rarely inspected by the Ministry of Education.

These schools are scheduled to admit about 150,000 students. Most of those pupils will be graduates of public primary schools and urban slums. But this has nothing to do with discrimination or social profiling by education officials but admission to the national and public provincial secondary schools favours children attending high-cost private schools.

Since the introduction of free primary education seven years ago, education gap between rich and poor and even between rural and urban areas has been increasing rapidly. Evidence indicates teacher absenteeism is chronic because of declining inspection of schools. Studies by the World Bank indicate on average teacher absenteeism at any time ranges between 20 and 25 per cent.

Crack down

Although last week Education Minister Sam Ongeri promised to crack down on private schools that used unethical methods in order to post good results in KCPE, there was total silence on what to be done to uplift performance in public primary schools. Granted some private schools have been using ‘unethical practices’, the Government is to blame for failing children in public primary schools.

Those households that are celebrating admission of their children to some secondary schools are doing so prematurely. Few are aware that some of those schools have never had any of their students scoring a minimum grade of C in KCSE.

Expectations

Although Ongeri said many students in public primary schools did very well in KCPE, he did not give figures as to how many of the 3,296 pupils admitted to Form One in 19 national schools were from public schools. Scrutiny of last year’s performance in KCPE showed about 90 per cent of the top 3,500 pupils were from private schools.

In one year or two most of those students are going to find out that their expectations of becoming cardiologists, surgeons, engineers, actuarial scientist and whatever other careers their parents wished them to undertake will be just a dream. Some parents will have to wait for four years to realise their children will not be candidates for top careers.

Article from The Standard | Online Edition

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 10:00 pm and is filed under News in Kenya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.