What You Need To Know:

• Public schools outshined private learning institutions in the 2020 KCPE examinations.
• Private schools have always dominated for decades hence questioned their sudden drop in performance.

The owners of private schools have raised questions on the sudden drop in performance of their institutions particularly in the 2020 Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results.

For decades, Private schools have produced most of the top students in Kenya’s national exams, but public institutions turned the tables on them.

Education Principal Secretary Dr. Julius Jwan has disputed accusations made by private school owners claiming that moderation of the results was done to favor public school pupils.

“Why would we do it this time? What would we want to achieve? These are all Kenyan children and they did quite well. Let’s not do business and play politics with the future of young people,” said Jwan adding that standardization cannot be done for selected schools only but the entire examination.

Dr. Jwan noted that the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic might have resulted in the declining performance of private schools stating that many of them suffered financial difficulties and therefore released their teachers while others were on half-pay.

“When we reopened for Standard Eight and Grade Four, they brought in only a few teachers for those classes whereas all teachers came back in public schools. This gave a lot of support to the candidates. This could have been a factor,” he said.

Most private schools in Kenya normally charge parents depending on their academic performance, their better infrastructure, and facilities compared to the public learning institutions.

Kenya Private Schools Association Stand

Kenya Private Schools Association chief executive Peter Ndoro said they are satisfied with results where candidates from public schools dominated the first 15 positions. Ndoro refuted claims Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) had discriminated against private schools.

“We may not have been number one or dominated the first 15 positions an announced by the Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha but if he had gone to the top 30, we would have had 19 candidates, out of the 100 top candidates, private schools had 73 and in 1,000 top candidates, private institutions got more than 700,” said Ndoro.

He said the outlook of private schools performance might not be as they had expected earlier but overall, they performed very well, much better than public schools.

“When you look at how many 400’s private schools had in 2019 KCPE exam, they were about 10,000 but this year is about 8,000. There is a drop with about 2,000 but despite this, we maintained the top position but the marks the candidates scored is not probably what we expected,” added Ndoro.

He said this drop does not mean there was something fishy hence the issues about discrimination in performance results does not arise, as the dominance of private schools remains leading in almost

all 47 counties.

“I think the only worry that our members or parents in private schools dominated the first 15 positions but they have not looked clearly at the bigger picture of overall performance. From where I sit, as the CEO of private schools association, there is nothing absolutely that has come

to our attention that there was something fishy,” he said.

“These scenarios affected both private and public learners and, therefore, we should look at the performance in a holistic way of the 1.1 million candidates and there is nothing out of the ordinary in the

the outcome,” he added.

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