The Ministry of Education has made changes to the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS) to enable parents to initiate transfers for their children from one school to another.
In addition, parents will now be able to monitor their children’s school attendance and view their performance among other benefits coming with the changes.
The Cabinet Secretary for Education Prof George Magoha launched the new NEMIS on the 22nd of August 2022 at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) where he revealed that the system will ensure efficiency in learners’ transfer process in order to save parents, headteachers and the ministry’s offices the overheads that come with manual application.
Besides, parents will be able to apply for bursaries and scholarships on the system with ‘Learner Attendance’ being a significant additional feature under the Competence Based Curriculum (CBC).
In the new NEMIS, class teachers will be able to manage the education process and in turn enable parents to view and monitor their children’s attendance and performance.
“With integration with the KNEC (Kenya National Examination Council) system, management of learner performance will be a real-time process, giving parents a correct reflection of their children’s results at any one time,” said Prof George Magoha.
Principals and Headteachers will also be able to apply for capitation for their schools on the system alongside other funds.
To improve accountability and transparency, the new system will have low-cost boarding funds, digital literacy, sanitary towels, learning materials and infrastructural programme grants upon approval by the Directors of Education.
“Directors of education will also be able to approve these funds applications, thereby providing another layer of accountability,” said Prof George Magoha.
Top-up capitation funds processes for Free Primary Education (FPE), Free Day Secondary Education (FDSE) and Special Needs Education (SNE) top-up capitation funds processes will require learners to have birth certificates in order to be eligible for capitation.
The selection and admission of Form One students will be added into the system and this will enable school principals to have an easy and efficient process of transitioning learners into their respective schools and parents will be able to easily monitor their learner’s transition process from one school level to another.
CS Magoha also revealed that the new NEMIS system has been integrated with third-party systems which are other stakeholders of education in order to allow for a more centralized and accurate up-to-date database of education.
Among the integrations is integration with the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) system for management of teacher data, the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) system for managing learner’s performance, the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) system for management of the education curricular and the provision of learning materials to institutions, and the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) system for the management of the health of learners.
In addition, infrastructure management will be facilitated to assist heads of institutions in the management of their infrastructural projects.
Geospatial data will be associated with the new NEMIS and this will inform project monitoring efforts and facilitate the project planning process of their schools.
Following the launch, prospective users will be trained on the system and then this will be cascaded to the counties and sub-counties up to institutional levels to ensure head teachers and principals receive capacity building around the new and improved processes.
“The system will then be rolled out for a pilot phase, to run parallel to the current NEMIS system, in order to effectively monitor user’s introduction and adaptation to the new system. The eventual rollout and switchover to the re-engineered system will then follow. This will be communicated to all involved stakeholders,” said Prof George Magoha.
Transferring learners under the Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) has been difficult with the government directing that there cannot be any switch once a pupil reaches Grade 5.
The new system will help parents, especially those having children in private schools who want to transfer them to public schools.