The Ministry of Education has denied favoring public schools in the recently released KCPE examinations.
This follows questions that owners of private schools raised concerning the sudden drop in performance of their schools in the 2020 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results.
Private schools have been performing better over the years than public schools. However, public schools performed better than private schools in the 2020 KCPE results.
The Ministry of Education’s Principal Secretary Dr. Julius Jwan has rubbished the allegations that owners of private schools made. Owners of private schools feel that the results were moderated to give public schools the edge.
“Why would we do it this time? What would we want to achieve? These are all Kenyan children and they did quite well. Let’s not do business and play politics with the future of young people,” said Dr. Jwan while also adding that standardization of KCPE examinations cannot be done only for selected schools but for the whole examination.
The PS said that the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused the decline in the performance of private schools saying that many of them went through financial struggles and therefore released their teachers while others were paid half their salaries.
“When we reopened for Standard Eight and Grade Four, they brought in only a few teachers for those classes whereas all teachers came back in public schools. This gave a lot of support to the candidates. This could be a factor,” said Dr. Julius Jwan.
Most of the private schools in the country charge fees based on their academic performance, better facilities, and infrastructure as compared to public learning institutions.
This makes it obvious that private schools are better equipped to provide learners with a good quality of education if we go by the first-class infrastructure and facilities that make the learning environment for learners to be better than in public ones.
Most public schools look like abandoned buildings and students and teachers brave the conditions to succeed in their academic endeavors.
However, it seems that COVID-19 did the trick this time on private schools leading to many teachers going for months without pay.
Kenya Private Schools Association Opinion
The Kenya Private Schools Association Chief Executive Peter Ndoro said that they are happy with the results where candidates from Public schools ranked in the first 15 positions.
Ndoro denied any claims that the Kenya Examinations Council (KNEC) discriminated against private schools.
“We may not have been number one or dominated the first 15 positions announced by the Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha but if he had gone to the top 30, we would have had 19 candidates, out of the 100 top candidates, private schools had 73 and in 1,000 top candidates, private institutions had more than 700,” said Ndoro.
According to Ndoro, how the private schools performed may not look as expected earlier but overall, they performed much better as compared to public schools.
“Looking at how many 400s private schools had in the 2019 examination, they were around 10,000 but this year we has 8,000. There is a drop with about 2,000 but regardless of this, we maintained the top position but the marks the candidates scored are not probably what we expected,” added Ndoro.
Besides, Ndoro said that the drop does not mean that there was something fishy. The issues about discrimination in performance results do not arise, as the dominance of private schools stands in almost 47 counties.
“I think that the only worry that our members or parents in private schools dominated the first 15 positions but they have not looked clearly at the bigger picture of overall performance. From where I sit, as the CEO of private schools association, there is nothing absolutely that has come to our attention that there was something fishy,” he said.
“These scenarios affected both private and public learners and therefore we should look at the performance in a holistic way of the 1.1 million candidates and there is nothing out of the ordinary in the outcome,” he added.