The Nation (Nairobi)
Samuel Siringi
8 July 2009
Nairobi — Principals have eased their calls for the scrapping of the controversial quota system used to admit students to secondary schools.
Instead they want the system reformed to make it fair and act as a tool for promoting national unity.
According to final resolutions of a meeting attended by more than 4,000 school heads in Mombasa last week, speakers were firm that the system be abolished for helping to promote disintegration.
Increase slots
The meeting resolved that more national schools should be created to absorb students from each part of the country.
Under the proposed system, provincial schools will be allowed to increase the slots allocated to students from other regions so that they can have near national mix of students.
District schools would become mainly day schools, under the system.
About 3,000 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education graduates are admitted to the country's 14 national schools.
Provincial schools then admit 85 per cent of students from their regions, and the rest from other provinces.
The principals called on the Education ministry to hold a national forum to chart ways of dealing with the challenges in the education system.
The system has for a long time, they said, placed too much emphasis on quality grades achieved at every level at the expense of low grades.
"Yet the plain reality is that half of the students who go through the secondary school level for four years get grades D+ and below."
Kenya Secondary School Heads Association chairman Cleophas Tirop said at the meeting that the system was creating a crisis where the majority of candidates who sat national exams were denied progression in the formal education system because of their grades.
They also want middle level colleges like youth polytechnics and technical institutes expanded and equipped to ensure more places for Form Four qualifiers.
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