Tuesday, December 28, 2010

First batch of free primary education graduate

Related StoriesBy Beauttah Omanga
The first batch of the Free Primary Education received their Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination results with Education Minister Prof sam Ongeri saying the number has grown by 27 percent with a marked improvement in majority of the subjects.
The minister said the country had 587,961 in 2003 taking the KCPE examinations but at the first group of a full FPE beneficiaries had seen the number reach 746,080.
The minister said the introduction of FPE in 2003 has enabled Kenya realise a significant growth in primary school enrolment from 5.9 million pupils in 2003 to 8.6 million in 2010 representing a 45.8 growth.
However, the huge enrolment in Standard One is not replicated at the end of the eight-year primary education course. Ongeri attributing the discrepancy in transition rate to repetition, HIV/Aids related challenges, which the ministry will investigate further to remedy the situation.
"This increase in candidate indicates that the FPE has enhanced access and equity in education for most Kenyans who would have had no chance to primary education," said Ongeri.
He also decried declining performance in Kiswahili subject despite it being recognised by the new Constitution as one of the national languages, the other being English.
"While the good performance is appreciated in most of the subjects, I am concerned with the poor performance in Kiswahili given its prominence in the new constitution as the official and national language" said the Minister.
Ongeri asked Education Secretary George Godia who was present during the release of this year’s KCPE results to immediately carry out investigations and address the drop in performance.
Calling for the probe into the poor performance, Ongeri said even though results had generally improved in seven out of the total of nine subjects, performance in Kiswahili was dismal.
According to the minister, girls performed better than boys in English objective, English composition, Kiswahili objective and Kiswahili composition. But boys performed better than girls in the rest of the five subjects.

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