School produced the top performers nationally
By Milliam.Murigi, April 18, 2021
Milliam Murigi @millymur1
Despite public schools producing the top performers during the recently announced Kenya Certificate for Primary Education (KCPE) exam, private schools still performed way better on average.
According to Elphas Kismati Andati, Principal Administrator Hillside School Utawala, on aggregate performance public schools have done poorly since only a small percentage of their students managed to get better grades when compared to private schools.
“A very good example is that at our school our last students managed to score 334 marks out of the possible 500 marks.
You will find out that a student with such marks in a certain public school is among the top ten performers in that school,” he says.
According to him, if the mean scores for private schools are compared with those from the public counterparts, public schools have done poorly and the issue of public schools producing the top ten performers nationally should not be a big bother to the private sector.
Hillside is one of the best performing private school in Mavoko constituency, Machakos County.
About 22 students from this school scored 400 marks and above. Some of the top performers were: Kamau Brenna Wangui who topped the list with 424 marks followed closely by Munyoke Natasha with 421 marks.
Odwuur John Wesley managed 413 marks, Ngugi Gloria Wangari 412, Akanga Tabitha Adera 411, and Randy Ross 410.
According to him, the good performance from the private sector is because of the online classes they were undertaking during the long covid-19 break unlike their public counterparts who never had such classes.
“I would like to urge all schools both public and private to embrace digital learning since this is where the future of education is.
We have seen even our public schools have the potential to perform better if they have all the privileges private schools have,” he adds.
On the issue of pardoning exam cheaters, he says that this was the worst decision made since it will lead to more cheating cases during national examination in the future