The government yesterday released Sh30 billion capitation for public secondary schools.
Basic Education PS Belio Kipsang said another Sh6 billion was disbursed for free primary education.
The funds should be in schools by end of the week, he said.
The PS said 500 secondary schools, with 300,000 students, will miss out as they are yet to upload student details on the National Education Management Information System (Nemis).
“Last year we told schools we were going to pay through Nemis but we ended up paying through the traditional way. But this year, everything is going to be through Nemis,” Kipsang said.
The PS spoke after touring Oloolaiser High School and Ngong Township Primary School in Kajiado.
This is good news to most schools that have been struggling to pay suppliers, buy stationery and pay teachers employed by boards after the funds failed to be released at the beginning of the month.
Every student gets Sh22,224 per year for tuition. Students in boarding schools foot the boarding fees based on the status of the institution.
National schools pay Sh53,554, while extra-county schools pay Sh40,535. Capitation for special needs secondary schools is Sh57,974, while parents pay Sh10,790 per year.
Kipsang said the funds could have been released last week, but more than 3,000 schools had by then not uploaded the students data on Nemis.
“We thought that if we pay and leave out 3,000 schools it would have been a crisis,” he said.
The PS said the ministry avoided transferring information of schools to Nemis to avoid making mistakes.
“If you make a mistake and send the money to a wrong account, we would be in more problems as a ministry than if the school owns the information by capturing it themselves,” Kipsang said.
100% transition
Kipsang said the 100 per cent transition has theoretically been achieved but data at the ministry by yesterday put it at 83 per cent.
“This is because a school like Oloolaiser has admitted 240 Form 1 students, but only 23 are captured on Nemis,” he said. The PS said the competency based curriculum had taken off well.
“They [pupils] are picking up quickly because the learning is activity based. It is not so much of telling them what to do and how to do it, so this is a total change,” Kipsang said.
Kipsang said the 12.5 million text books had reached most schools by January 15. A fresh tender for distribution of 13 million extra books was opened yesterday, he said.
The tendering will be for texts on hygiene, environment and religious studies. The 12 million books covered core subjects of English, Kiswahili, Mathematics, Physics and Biology in secondary schools and Mathematics, English, Science and Kiswahili in primary schools. “We hope within the next three to four weeks, all the books that we require for the CBC will be in our schools,” Kipsang said.