Anxious time for KCPE candidates over exam results
A standard Eight Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) candidate. The 2011 results released this week indicate the overall candidate’s performance in two of the main languages used in the country and in the East Africa region dropped in 2011 compared to 2010, with the Minister of Education, Sam Ongeri blaming it on increased usage of the slang based language throughout the country.
The 2011 KCPE results will be released Wednesday morning, ending the anxious wait for the 775,000 candidates who sat the examination this year.
The results will be released via text messages. Candidates will be required to send their index numbers to the number 55052. The results will later be posted on the ministry’s website.
During last year’s Form One selection for candidates who sat the exam in 2009, a controversial criteria for allocating seats in the 18 national schools caused uproar among academies as preference was given to candidates from public primary schools.
The Kenya Private Schools Association said the decision as discriminatory. This year, the Ministry of Education released new guidelines last week to be implemented during the Form One selection next month. The move comes after the government increased the number of places in Form One.
“We expect the new model will give all candidates an equal opportunity and will be based on merit as opposed to being based on the type of school you went to,” said Kenya Private Schools Association chairman John Kabui.
Under the new selection criteria, national schools will use district quotas to select students from public and private schools. The schools currently categorised as provincial will also be renamed county schools and will select their pool of students from districts, counties and also nationally.
Forty per cent of the slots in county schools will be reserved for candidates from that county, a further 40 per cent for candidates from other counties and 20 per cent from the district where the school is found. The guidelines follow the upgrade of 30 schools to national status effective next year. Another 57 schools have also been earmarked to acquire national status in the second and third phases of the project. The entire project is expected to cost around Sh750 million.
The move was meant to address concerns that students from public primary schools, who are presumed to be disadvantaged in terms of education facilities and social background, were losing out in national school admissions.
The introduction of free primary education in 2003 — when 481,000 pupils sat for KCPE — saw a surge in the intake of children to schools, piling pressure on existing infrastructure.
Once again, the examinations body will come under scrutiny over the use of technology to deliver results.
“There is nothing we can do since there is normally too much traffic when everyone tries to get their results jamming the system and causing the website to malfunction,” said Knec public relations officer Frida Were last week while announcing exam release date.
