By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

08 February 2015

After the public outcry regarding the national schools form-one selections, I went to the Ministry of Education website to look for information and I was shocked. The page is written in English, but it reads like Greek mixed with Arabic and a sprinkling of Chinese! Still, I tried to make sense of it and this is what I came out with.

The process gives priority to pupils’ choices. Those who have chosen a particular school as their first preference are grouped according to their primary school districts. The same is done for the second, third and fourth preferences.

Each district group is then split into two subgroups: one for public and the other for private primary schools. Next; the pupils in each subgroup are arranged in order of their KCPE scores.

Pupils to be admitted to a particular school are then selected from the “first-preference” list in their order of merit (KCPE marks). If the secondary school does not fill up, it is given pupils in the second “preference list”, then the third and, finally, the fourth list.

It is important to note that, at this stage of the process, pupils are not assigned to schools they did not choose no matter how high their scores were! As can be expected, the most popular national schools – the Alliances, Starehes etc – fill up with students from the “first-preference” list.

Once all the nation school slots are filled up, the process moves to county schools. In this case, the pupils who have applied to a particular school are divided into three groups: (1) applicants from outside the secondary school’s county, (2) those from within its county (but outside its home district), and, (3) those from its home district.

The allocation is done in order of KCPE merit and according to the following quotas: Group (1) gets 40 per cent of places, Group (2) 40 per cent and Group (3) 20 per cent. Again, popular county schools fill up quickly with pupils from “first-preference” county school lists.

Because of this prioritisation of pupils’ choices, many are left out since all their preferred schools are filled by those who were in “higher-preference” lists. These pupils are assigned to schools which still have spaces. These will obviously not be amongst those chosen by the pupil.

My take on this is that it is fair; however, pupils must choose carefully. If we concentrate only on the marks scored, we will miss the opportunity to teach our children that life is about making choices and “choices have consequences”!

A good example is one Albert Ochieng who was reported in the Daily Nation of January 28. He scored 407 marks and could not make it to any of his chosen national schools: Alliance, Maranda, Lenana, and Maseno (all very popular).

Once he missed out on Alliance, he could not get his other choices because they had been filled by their “first-preference” list! So he ended up in a County school – Ramba Boys, in his home county of Siaya.