Education Minister to announce KCPE examination results on Wednesday

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By Felix Olick and George Orido

Pupils who sat the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination this year will be waiting with bated breath for their results, which will be released on Wednesday.

The results are crucial because they will determine which schools the candidates join in Form One next year.

Education Minister Sam Ongeri will release the results for 775,820 candidates this morning.

Early this year during the Form One intake, the fight for slots in secondary schools took an intriguing turn after the minister announced that pupils from public schools would join national and provincial schools with lower marks compared to their counterparts from private schools and academies.

Quota system

But this time, the Government has scrapped the controversial quota system of admitting students into national schools, a move that will see several candidates from private schools get admission into the prestigious national schools.

According to the new guidelines earlier released by the Ministry of Education, national schools will now use district quotas to pick students without discriminating whether they are from public or private primary schools.

The circular titled Projections for The Year 2012 Form One Admission to Secondary Schools, will see public and private school candidates compete on an equal footing for places in the national schools.

It is this development that is going to change the face of national schools after their number rises by two schools in each county. So, after many years the number of national schools is set to increase from 18 to 112.

The new rules also scraped the provincial schools category, instead renaming them county schools.

County schools will be allowed to select candidates from the districts, counties and even at the national level.

However, county secondary schools are expected to reserve 40 per cent of their places for candidates from within the county while another 40 per cent of slots for candidates from other counties.

The rest, 20 per cent, will come from the district where the school is located.

Text message

The Kenya National Examination Council has also made it easier to access examination results.

Candidates will be able to receive their results by sending their index number through a short text message (sms) to 5052.

However, this is only possible immediately after the announcement of results by the Minister for Education Prof Sam Ongeri.

The results will also be available on the KNEC website: www.knec.ac.ke

Parents this time round will have to deal with harsher economic environment that has seen the shilling weaken against major currencies.

As a result school fees will be a hard nut to crack for many and might see a number of bright students miss opportunities.

That is why the recent announcement by USaid that it will pump in money to see 2,140 needy students with over 350 marks through secondary school is music in the ears of many candidates.