NAIROBI: Recent reports that the Ministry of Education and the Kenya Private Schools Association (KPSA) had agreed on non-discriminatory Form One admission criteria are welcome.
According to the report, 700,000 of the 937,467 candidates who sat the 2015 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examinations will be admitted to public schools.
The admission will be based on merit, quota system, equity, affirmative action and the choices that the learners made during their selection of preferred schools. This should be the Government policy in admission at any level of education.
“We had a good meeting and agreed on most of the issues. All we are waiting for is the implementation of what we agreed on,” Kenya Private Schools Association (KPSA) chairman Ernest Wangai said after the meeting.
But even as he said this, candidates who took their examination in 2014 may be wishing they were admitted afresh. Most of them, particularly those who sat for the exams in private schools, had to look for other schools after the Government preserved the best national schools for those who had not performed very well from public schools.
Pupils with as low as 250 marks were admitted to national schools at the expense of those with 400 marks and above from private schools.
While it is understandable that some learners face insurmountable challenges during their years of primary schooling, and require some positive discrimination when it comes to selection, basing admission purely on such criterion promotes unintended inequalities, demoralises those who succeed on account of hard work, and criminalises learners from private schools whose parents are not necessarily rich but sacrifice to give their children quality education.
Affirmative action as envisaged in the Constitution is a temporary measure founded on well-documented historical injustices and systemic marginalisation perpetrated through lop-sided colonial government policies that put a higher premium on ‘areas of high potential’ at the expense of other regions. Post-colonial governments perpetuated this policy under Sessional Paper No. 10 until it was realised a bit too late in the day that it is such discriminative and skewed approaches to development that were responsible for the socio-economic and political disparities bedeviling the society.
But when affirmative action alone is viewed as the panacea for such deeply entrenched inequalities without concrete and time-bound steps to ameliorate the situation that led to the inequalities in the first place, it has the potential to spawn widespread feelings of entitlement on the beneficiaries and bitterness on those victimized, particularly when the victims are not part of the generation that perpetrated the ills for which affirmative action is called for.
The assumption that any child who attends a private school comes from a well-to-do family is just that; a supposition. Some of the so-called ‘academies’ in urban areas in Kenya operate in more difficult situations than public schools in rural areas.
Go to Kibera, Korogocho, Mathare and other sprawling slums in our urban areas and you will be shocked at the extremely difficult circumstances under which some of these so called ‘academies’ operate.
They operate as informal schools that provide alternative opportunities to learners who cannot cope with the demands of public schools like uniforms, shoes and have feeding programmes.
Yet the mere mention of ‘academy’ conjures up images of material comfort and privileged circumstances in the public mind, as if poverty is something to be proud of, glorified and rewarded. It is to such informal schools that children who initially rushed to public schools at the introduction of free primary education (FPE) went back to when numbers swelled beyond the capacity of classrooms and teachers to cope with.
A study conducted by United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) in 2004, a year after the introduction of FPE confirmed that “after the initial increase in enrolment, public schools began to experience a decline due to dropouts and transfer to private schools”.
There was also the perennial teacher shortage, a problem that the government has not addressed to date! With free primary education, learners who had dropped out rushed back to get an education that they so craved but lacked the resources to pursue.
But only a quarter of the learners were in classes appropriate to their age. It is within such context that some parents, concerned at the possibility of indiscipline and deviant behaviour creeping in, took away their children to private schools.
The solution to poor performance in public schools can only be addressed if the government looked into these issues. Victimising private-school learners is just an excuse and not a solution to inequalities in the education system.
