Grade 9 learners will begin selecting their Senior Secondary Schools on May 20, the government has announced.
The move was announced on Thursday, April 24, by Education PS Julius Jwan while addressing the National Convention on Competency-Based Education at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC).
According to the PS, the process is beginning early to ensure students transition smoothly from Junior Secondary School to Senior Secondary School, which starts at Grade 10.
"We have worked on guidelines to transition our learners from Grade 9 to Grade 10. Starting May 20, we are going to have our learners begin their choices for senior schools," he said.
Bitok further added that, unlike in previous years, the government was keen on leveraging technology during the selection process.
Schools will be categorised based on pathways, including Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), Social Sciences (Humanities), Performing Arts, Music, and Athletics, according to the Deputy Director of Education at the Ministry of Education, Fred Odhiambo.
Learners will then be required to pick 12 schools during the selection process. Nine of these schools are supposed to be boarding schools, and within these nine, three must come from the learner's home county.
The remaining three school choices will inevitably be day schools based in the learner's home sub-county.
This was the latest major announcement from the Ministry of Education, coming just hours after CS Ogamba directed that some form of mathematics be reinstated as a compulsory subject in senior secondary schools.
Notably, Mathematics, which was set to be an optional subject in SSS, will now be mandatory following the directive issued by Education CS Julius Ogamba.
According to the CS, with this new directive, students who choose the STEM pathway will take pure mathematics, while the other two pathways will have a simpler version of mathematics.
''We will have the STEM pathways taking pure maths, and the other two pathways having a form of maths, so that we have maths in all three pathways in senior school,'' the CS explained.
Contrary to the 8-4-4 curriculum, where mathematics was a compulsory subject, the Ministry had directed that students in senior school would now have the option to drop the subject depending on the pathway they chose.
