Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i says candidates will have received their admission letters before Christmas Day/FILE
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 1 – The Form One selection exercise will be completed by Friday next week to enable candidates prepare to join secondary school next year.
Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i says candidates will have received their admission letters before Christmas Day.
“As I release the 2016 KCPE examination results today, I assure all parents and guardians that appropriate arrangements are in place to admit the 2016 KCPE examination candidates into public secondary schools based on merit, quotas, equity, affirmative action and candidate choices,” the CS said.
“The selection will also ensure that children from disadvantaged backgrounds continue with their education. I also wish to assure the public that all candidates who scored 400 marks and above will be admitted to national schools irrespective of their gender, region or centre.”
The Form One selection exercise will commence on December 9, 2016.
It is the first time KCPE results have been released at the beginning of December, a move lauded by the education stakeholders.
To ensure education is accessible to all Kenyans children at all levels, he said the government will continue paying KCPE and KCSE examinations fees.
The government, he said, will from 2017 extend the payment of examinations fees to all KCPE and KCSE candidates in private schools.
“This is a commendable move by government that is testimony of its determination to improve access to education for all children,” he said.
Legislator Sabina Chege, the Chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee on Education urged Kenyan parents to be cautious with their spending since their children will be reporting to secondary school in January.
“I am a proud Kenyan today knowing that we have concluded an exercise without any major hitch,” she said.
She said more measures will be put in place to ensure the trend continues.
“We just want the quality of education to be enhanced. We want our children to celebrate knowing that they garnered what is theirs,” Chege asserted.
They were outcomes that Matiang’i said that were achieved through team work and especially the role of school head teachers, whom he described as this year’s heroes and heroines.
“The desired and credible KCPE results are now here and we can start focusing on and scrutinising them,” the CS said.
“The world over, education reforms and reviews of evaluation are viewed as critical aspects of assessing learning. Most countries are turning to adoption of continuous assessments over summative evaluation. We in Kenya are planning to go this direction in due course.”
In the planned changes to the education curriculum, he said the Education Ministry has proposed to gradually invest in the change that focuses on continuous evaluation.
In part, he said that this will require reforming the current teacher training framework, a retraining of some of the critical actors in the evaluation chain and a relook at the whole process of the spectrum of assessment.
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