KCSE 2013

            County schools challenge national schools in KCSE 2013 performance

I take this opportunity to congratulate county schools for their outrageous performance in K.C.S.E 2013. It is a clear indication that despite these schools having the second category of the average students they straggle to turn all locks and emerge victorious. Thirty six percent of top 100 schools nationally were county schools.

Few days ago, the government standardized the secondary school fees, which had hiked due to the large number of pupils who wanted to join national schools However there is a bigger problem rather than school fees; how to treat our students with the equality they deserve. There should be another step, a step to re organize the whole education system in order to have good and quality education.

 Thousands of students in Kenya end up terminating their education due to lack of school fees or failure in their exams .The poor development in our schools have prompted  parents to dig deeper into their pockets to fund some of the school projects . Head teachers have taken this advantage to charge high fees to pupils and students joining standard one and form one respectively. The problem is not the head teacher’s introduced rates but the fact that public schools are underdeveloped so developing and equipping our public schools will be better than solving the problem than solving the issue of school fees alone.

Another problem is that public schools are subjected to student duties every time. Here national schools are exempted from some of the duties. When students are required to carry garden tools as part of their enrollment requirements, several questions arise. One is whether the students join schools to train how to perform duties or to study? I really wonder how a student can carry brooms, squeezers, machetes and hoes to their academic vocation. They are completely incompatible. Students should be exempted from strenuous duties and instead the board of governors should create jobs opportunity by employing more workers

 Finally, apart from duties, there is also an unseen concern, the concern about how our schools are ranked. I tend to question the ranking of our national schools. National schools only enroll top students or the `clever’ lot. Having search schools mean that there is a literacy gap that we are creating. If we believe that having national schools we are improving our education system, then we are wrong. Why do we subject the other disadvantaged lot to poor teaching and undeveloped institutions? When we dictate that it is only some selected few will join national schools then where will the provincial, county and local schools get there their fairness, bearing in mind that the hierarchy differs in order of development as well as performance? How do we expect a student who studied in a school with neither laboratory nor laboratory equipments to compete with a student who went to the multi-developed national schools? Well food for thought.

MWANGI EDWIN

Multimedia university of Kenya Nairobi