Over two million learners are this week sitting for two important examinations: The Kenya Primary School Education Assessment (KPSEA) for Grade Six, and the Kenya Junior School Education Assessment (KJSEA) for Grade Nine.
These are milestones in the education journey of every young Kenyan and even as we wish each of them success, we know that there are some who will perform better than others for various reasons.
One is that not all schools are equally prepared. If anything, there are one too many public schools that are poorly equipped to give learners the best classroom experience possible, and their challenges are compounded by perennial delays by the National Treasury to release capitation funds.
This year has been particularly bad, and, without a doubt, this has severely compromised the capacity of affected schools to adequately prepare their candidates for the exams that kicked off on Monday, October 27.
In Kenya generally, public schools achieve lower average scores per learner compared to private schools, in part because the latter have invested in personnel and infrastructure that together ensure that children can excel in their academic work all factors being constant.
This, in turn, has spawned a tendency by the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) to “moderate” results for private schools, lowering their scores so that they can be closely matched with their counterparts from public schools. And because competition for public schools as the candidates transition is high, these implies that deserving children are often locked out simply because they attended academies.
While seeking equity in access to education is a goal that every citizen should aspire to, there is need to guard against the risk of denying opportunities to bright learners from a middle-class background access to good schools based on their family circumstances, just as it is not fair for children from poor families to be locked out on account of inability to pay fees.
So, what can be done to improve access for all over the medium term given the pressure that the government faces in enforcing universal transition rates? The first step, I think, should be to put in place a development programme for all public schools. Initiatives such as the drive to build model schools in counties — also known as centres of excellence — ought to be expanded to benefit more institutions. This will over time reduce competition for places in national and county schools.
For this to be achieved, however, the blueprint ought to be designed in a way that it will transcend administrations. This ensure that subsequent governments do not stall or reverse the gains once the transformation journey starts. Unless the programme is ring-fenced in law and other legal instruments, the risk of regressing will remain all too real and will undermine the broad goal of addressing the problem of inequality.
Even as the government does this, institutions like KNEC should desist from punishing learners from private schools who seek to transition to public ones. First, it should remember that these are children of taxpayers, and their parents took them to academies because they were not satisfied with the quality of education offered in public schools. Rather than punish them, government ought to improve the quality of public schools to make them attractive in the first place.
Secondly, since there is a shortage of private Junior and Senior schools, it makes sense for the government to encourage private investments at these two levels. Consider that there is a large supply of private institutions from kindergarten to Grade Six and at university level, but there are too few at junior and senior school levels. This gap conspires to deny children the right to transition for at least the first 12 years of their education, a gap that flies in the face of constitutional guarantees.
Even as we pursue the big picture, the more immediate problem of leaking exams to corrupt schools, parents and candidates ought to be addressed with the seriousness it deserves. Such theft disadvantages learners who genuinely put in honest effort to pass their exams.
Whereas it is encouraging to see that Knec has invested in systems that reduce exposure of examination materials to unauthorised parties, it is highly disturbing that papers still leak.
Besides compromising the quality of the examinations and contaminating the integrity of the results, leaking is insidious in the sense that it gives an unfair advantage to candidates whose teachers or parents obtain the papers corruptly, hence exacerbating inequality.
mbugua@nairobilawmonthly.com
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