Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha has responded after a report by the Kenyan National Examinations Council (KNEC) raised alarm over mass failure by the KCPE class of 2021 which will be sitting their final exams next month.
Speaking at Mukuru Kwa Njenga Primary School yesterday, Magoha exhibited a lot of confidence in this year’s candidates to perform well in the national examination, despite the failure in the KNEC assessment test.
Magoha stated that the results of the assessment were regrettable but assured that the ministry was working on ensuring an improvement.
The CS highlighted that teachers were already intervening to yield good results in the forthcoming national examinations.
He clarified that the assessment by KNEC was only meant to establish the impact of the long Covid-19 school closure on the learners.
He added that KNEC only played the role of providing the assessment items and processing the national report - further faulting the media for their average of the concerns.
“Why contextualize this to say that this test was done yesterday and these excellent kids are going to fail the exams? They are not going to fail as widely as circulated by the media,” Magoha stated.
The public together with the media wad urged to support the candidates by giving them positive energy instead of demoralizing them.
According to the report released by KNEC on Monday regarding the assessment, majority of the KCPE candidates failed to attain the minimum pass mark of 50 percent. The report showed that mathematics and languages gave the lowest results.
"In sign language Composition, Mathematics, KSL (Language) English Composition and Kiswahili Composition (Insha) only 25.94%, 34.54%, 36.18%, 39.90%, and 45.19% of the learners respectively attained the minimum proficiency level,” part of the report stated.
The candidates also performed poorly in essay-based quizzes as opposed to multiple-choice questions, and in Mathematics, most of them were not competent n ratios, percentages, averages and measurements.
According to gender performance, girls outperformed the boys in languages scoring an average of 48.965 percent against 46.08. However, boys outperformed in sciences and mathematics.
About 1.1 million candidates are expected to sit KCPE examination, beginning March 22 and ending March 24.
