By Roy Hezron
Kenya Private Schools Association (KPSA) has rubbished the ongoing discussions that public schools did well as compared to private schools in the recently released Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE).
Speaking to Education News on phone recently, Peter Ndoro who is the Chief Executive Officer of KPSA stated that the ongoing debate is not true since private schools performed well in the examination.
“That is actually not true because when you look at the performance of private schools across the board, you find that it is very way above the public sector,” said Ndoro.
Ndoro asserted that it is only among the top 15 candidates that public schools did very well but private schools dominated in the top 100 and 1000 candidates.
He congratulated public schools for good performance in producing many candidates in the top 15 positions countrywide.
“It is only that among the top 15 (candidates), majority are from public schools but when you look at top 100 (candidates) 73 per cent come from private schools; when you go further and look at top 1,000 (candidates), 711 candidates come from private schools. The issue of public schools turning tables from private schools does not a rise,” he added.
The same was echoed by the association national treasurer George Mudanyi who is also the chairperson board of directors at Mudasa Academy who too raised concern on how standardisation was applied.
“We were wishing that somebody gave us the index they used when they were doing standardisation to make sure it was actually across the board fair to all students, and that the government was not trying to show an image that they have done well,” said Mudanyi.
Mudanyi further added all children should be treated as Kenyan children and the issue of polarizing public and private schools should not arise and urged that the Form One admission should be done fairly to all children.
“We should not polarized the Kenyan children and divide them into public and private schools. Let us look children as children so that if somebody has performed well and deserve to go to a certain school, let that person get that school it should not matter whether is from private or public schools,” added Mudanyi.
