Wednesday, January 4, 2012

After KCPE, competition for secondary education starts


By Wachira Kigotho

The tragedy of two teenage girls, Mercy Chebet and Sylvia Wanjiku, that committed suicide because of frustration with scores obtained in the last year’s KCPE exams is an indicator that many children are giving up hope early in life.
The stark realisation that a good education is the way to success has in the recent years triggered a war-like competition for admission to quality public secondary schools.
The cutthroat race has often been fueled by parents who have been expecting too much from their children, even as they attended schools without adequate learning resources.
But unlike elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa where on average two out of three children are left out of secondary school, in Kenya transition rate stands at 71 per cent. However, this achievement is dimmed by low quality of most secondary schools.
Beyond the veneer of high transition rates lies the morass represented by public district and low-cost private schools that admit over 70 per cent of students that join secondary education each year. These categories of schools comprise more than 5,500 schools in the country and have limited capacity to prepare their students for higher education. Year after year, most of those schools are stacked at the lower end of the KCSE ranking index.
Subsequently, most parents and teachers perceive children to have failed KCPE if they did not garner enough points to enable them join national or county secondary schools. According to Dr Felistus Kinyanjui, and educational researcher at Egerton University, Form One placement is a nightmare to many parents in Kenya. In most cases, the secondary school that one attends in Kenya determines one’s chances of proceeding to higher education as well as future career prospects.
Vehicle out of poverty
"Once a pupil has missed a chance in a national or a county school his or her chances of success in life is reduced by more than a half," says Dr Kinyanjui.
Globally, secondary schools are being regarded as vehicles to enable youth to free from poverty. "There can be no escape from poverty without a vast expansion of quality secondary education," says UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Director-General Irina Bokova.
Basically, this is the bare minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills they need to secure decent livelihoods in today’s globalised world. Consequently, in many countries, quality secondary education has become a major challenge for policymakers in adapting it as a tool towards youth’s prosperity.
"It represents a critical stage of the system that not only links primary education to higher education, but also connects the school system to the labour market," says Hendrik van der Pol, Director of the Unesco Institute for Statistics.
Notably, this is how pupils and their parents in Kenya have come to view performance in KCPE. "Your child gets admitted to a national school and there is no barrier between him and success," a parent recently told this writer.
However, the road to a national or in that matter a country school hard as primary education system is characterised by wastage.
About 40 per cent of pupils of any Standard One cohort never complete the eight years cycle of primary education. Late entry, dropping out early, repetition, teacher absenteeism, theft of school funds, corruption, poor management styles are just some of the barriers that are denying many pupils to access quality secondary education.
Interestingly, Kenya is not bent on quality education but on achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals on universal primary education and other related targets. But whereas those pursuits are necessary, quality of secondary education need to be the new driving force if the country was to realise its Vision 2030.
The end of primary education is no longer the most common exit point from the education system. The need for sophisticated workers with relevant skills and competencies has raised the bar for demand of quality secondary education.
In their naÔvetÈ, Chebet and Wanjiku were just telling Kenyan society what it seems to forget.
In death, the two girls are grim reminders to Kenyans that the existing education system is in need of reforms, not merely based on structure but a comprehensive school curriculum built on agreement between research, practice and policy considerations.
While releasing results of last year’s KCPE Minister Sam Ongeri alluded to some of the key elements to quality education.
Sheng factor
"Repetition does not add value in education," said Ongeri. But whereas the minister recognised that repetition was a drawback to primary education he failed to order over-age students to be encouraged to join adult education classes instead of seeking admission in regular schools.
Ongeri also pointed out how Sheng was responsible for poor performance in English and Kiswahili. This was the first time that a senior official of the ministry was conceded that Sheng was lowering academic performance in languages. Even then there is need for more research on how Sheng was impacting negatively on those key languages.
Nevertheless, initial studies by Unesco-backed Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality show repetition has too little impact on performance and teachers should discourage parents allowing their children to repeat.
But as the race for quality secondary education takes centre-stage globally, Ministry of Education should realise most of secondary schools are nothing more than academic slums.
There is need to rethink of making teaching more attractive for talented graduates by allowing them to opt into a system of higher pay and faster promotion based on performance.

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