Why secondary school category determines learners' KCSE success - report

The category of the secondary school that a learner attends and not the mark attained at primary school, largely determines their success or failure.

This has been revealed by the Usawa Agenda Secondary School Survey released on Wednesday. 

According to the survey, national schools which are the highest ranked, enjoy great privilege compared to Subcounty schools which are the lowest ranked, both in staffing and funding.

"This disproportionate resource allocation based on the category of school one attends impacts their performance in KCSE examinations more than their secondary school entry marks," Emmanuel Manyasa said.

Manyasa who is the Usawa Agenda Executive Director spoke during the launch of the report. 

According to the report, 48 per cent of secondary schools in Kenya are day.

From the data, 73 per cent of Subcounty schools are day schools while there is no national day school. 

The data further shows that 4.4 per cent and 3.6 per cent of county and extra-county schools, respectively are day.

Manyasa said Subcounty schools offer the least opportunity to excel while the national schools offer the best opportunity to excel, according to the findings of the survey. 

In terms of number of teachers schools have per examined subject, the survey revealed that national schools have more than three times the number of teachers in Subcounty schools.

The report also showed national schools have more than double the national average of the number of teachers per examined subject.

"National schools are therefore more resilient to outward teacher transitions than the other categories of schools," the report reads.

"Subcounty schools are the most vulnerable to outward teacher transitions among all the categories of schools," it says. 

National schools were also found to have more experienced principals, better operational libraries and laboratories. 

Manyasa said time had come for Kenyans to seriously think about levelling the education field as a way of fostering Education Justice for every child.

“As a country, we are working to achieve the SDG 4, which is to ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all," he said. 

“The pursuit of the SDG 4, is anchored on the presumption that the school system is just and equitable and that what every learner emerges with from it is a true reflection of their ability and effort. Well, the evidence at hand suggests otherwise.”

The release of the survey findings was attended by top Ministry of Education officials, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), development partners such as the World Bank, UNICEF, teachers’ unions and civil society organisations. 

Usawa Agenda undertook stratified random sampling of schools to obtain a nationally representative sample of 1,342 secondary schools.

Stratification was done at three levels: county, gender and category of schools.

Six different categories of schools were sampled from national, extra-county, county, sub-county, private and special schools.

Within these strata, there was further stratification into boys, girls and mixed secondary schools.

Survey tools were developed, pretested and piloted ahead of the survey.

The primary respondents were principals of the selected schools.