Ignore Nemis at own peril, Education Cabinet Secretary Magoha warns
Education Cabinet Secretary George Magoha has warned school heads and officials frustrating the National Education Management Information System (Nemis) to divert resources meant for learners.
He said he is prepared to fight for the system, which many schools abandoned recently during Form One admission after it crashed.
“There are crooks fighting the system for their own reasons. The crooks want to manipulate the system so that it appears to be inconvenient so that they can swindle funds. This is why in some schools it is working and in others it is not,” he said.
He revealed the government was in the process of re-engineering the system to ensure accurate and real time data capture to facilitate monitoring and evaluation of all education programmes and account for all learners.
“Currently, we are monitoring the real time data coming through Nemis that will help us to make critical decisions on tracking the students who will not have reported to respective secondary schools,” said the CS.
Magoha, meanwhile, appealed to security agencies to take action on paedophiles as well as parents abetting early marriages.
Addressing the annual security review and planning conference in Mombasa yesterday, the CS said teenage pregnancies was a stumbling block to the government’s 100 per cent transition from primary to secondary school.
“With a lot of humility, I am asking you to help us in this. The chiefs need to be empowered to go round in every village and ensure all students report to school even if they are pregnant,” Magoha told the meeting that brought together top security chiefs, regional commanders and County Commissioners.
Out of 1,088,986 who registered for KCPE exam, Magoha said 1,083,456 sat the national exam and 1,075, 201 have been admitted to public secondary schools across the country. The figure excludes inmates, adult learners and refugees in camps.
He cited space and infrastructural challenges in most secondary school as another obstacle to the transition policy.
On the Competency-Based Curriculum, the CS said the system has now proved to be “very successful”, teething problems notwithstanding.
He told the conference that all public schools have received required textbooks on a ratio of 1:1 adding a total of 339, 752 teachers from public and private schools have so far been trained on CBC.
“Teachers are in classes in full swing and now I am beginning to see the burden of CBC get off my back,” he said, adding that he has established a taskforce to advise the ministry on 100 per cent transition of learners from Grade Six (primary ) to Grade Seven (junior secondary ) by 2023.
