The Ministry of Education has issued a stern warning to school heads over a collection of money from KPSEA and KCPE candidates who are sitting for their examinations starting today and finishing them on the 30th of November 2022.
The Director General of the Education Ministry has revealed that some heads of institutions have been reported to be asking for money from parents for facilitation and lunch during the examinations. This is an infringement of the government’s directives.
“This is against the ministry’s guidelines issued earlier on illegal levies. The provision of lunch for candidates should not be forced on parents. All field officers are instructed to stop this and report such cases to this office immediately. Action will be taken against any officer in whose jurisdiction such cases are reported,” read part of a circular issued by Kibet to County Directors of Education dated the 24th of November 2022.
Some parents have already vented their frustrations and complaints to authorities over being asked for money to cater lunch for supervisors, invigilators and security personnel.
“My child has been told to inform me that if I will not pay they will not allow him to sit for his national examinations,” said one of the parents.
Grade 6 and Standard 8 did their rehearsals yesterday in preparation for their examinations that began today.
Learners in non-candidate classes have already closed and gone home to allow for smooth administration of the national examinations of KCSE, KPSEA and KCPE.
During the rehearsal, the candidates were introduced to those who will administer their national examinations.
Grade 6 learners are sitting for five papers with these being English, Integrated Science, Kiswahili and Creative Arts and social studies.
The KPSEA questions are in multiple-choice format and are different from the school-based assessments under the new Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC) where learners are tested using rubrics.
The learners will not be writing English Composition and Kiswahili Insha because their assessment is done in schools.
The assessment will cover 40 per cent of each paper while the formative school-based assessments that they did in Grades 4-6 account for 60 per cent.
Scores for the formative school-based assessments were already uploaded to the KNEC Portal.
Online uploading was created to reduce the need to reduce the cost of logistics. The government allocates around Kshs. 4 billion to KNEC to administer national examinations.
Despite the increased number of candidates (1.35 million candidates), no extra money was allocated to KNEC. It is intriguing how the examiner will deal with this situation.