Parents Demand Slots In National Schools For Pupils With 400 marks and above
George Magoha, Cabinet Secretary for Education, is under pressure to implement the new placement formula for Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) candidates, which will see all those who scored more than 400 points enroll in national schools.
Earlier, the CS announced that affirmative action will be used to ensure that all national schools in the country have a national perspective in terms of representation.
However, parents from the larger Kiambu County have objected to the formular, claiming that they should be allocated 30% of the slots in regional national schools.
Speaking to the media on Tuesday, April 5, the parents argued that all students from the county who scored 400 points should be given first priority during the placement process.
Kiambu Parents Association, led by their chairman, Samuel Wanjema, and Peter Wainaina, a Kiambu County Assembly Education Committee member, issued the demands.
Wanjema and Wainaina claimed that they had been taken advantage of in previous years and would not accept less this year.
“Our concerns as raised by parents and headteachers from the primary schools is that our students be given 30 per cent of the slots from the over seven national schools in the county.
“We need the slots during selection. They should in fact be given all those slots,” Wanjema stated.
Wainaina went on to say that at least 1,000 of the 3,500 available slots should go to Kiambu students.
“We are not requesting, we are demanding. Those are our schools, we built them,” Wainaina, who represents parents at the county assembly, stated.
According to Education CS, selection will be done in a more equitable manner for all students.
Top students from across the country will be chosen and placed in a single pool before being assigned to various national schools.
“We will take the marks of all children, then we will get the best from all those counties and place them to different national schools distributed across the nation,"Magoha explained.
Magoha noted that this will work to ensure that all top schools in the country have a national outlook in terms of representation.
Parents Demand Slots In National Schools For Pupils With 400 marks and above
