Primary schools to host the Junior Secondary School (JSS) will be required to form a special sub-committee that will work under board management to control funds set aside for the program.
This is according to Nyeri County Director of Education, Sabina Aroni, who says the JSS resources will be administered through the sub-committees.
“The primary school’s Board of Management will now be required to form a JSS sub-committee which will deal with the management of the junior secondary school,” she said.
According to Aroni, the decision was arrived at by the ministry of education which acknowledges Junior Secondary Schools as a distinct level of education.
“The guidelines which will be used to operationalize the Junior Secondary School have already been developed and publicized, with time, the ministry will give guidelines on what will happen in the future,” said Ms. Aroni.
Ms Aroni’s remarks follows an ongoing Rapid Result Initiative (RRI) aimed at assessing the capacity of primary and private secondary schools to host junior secondary.
The exercise is targeting 32,000 private and public primary schools countrywide where the 1,287,579 Grade Six students will be domiciled under JSS.
Ms Aroni said that by Tuesday,109 out of the 500 private and public primary schools in the county had been assessed, adding that the exercise will be complete by Wednesday next week to pave way for the registration of the qualifying schools.
“Apart from the assessment of private and public primary schools to check their status and report their suitability to host JSS, the other major preparations that are going on is the re-tooling of the teachers who are supposed to handle the students in the junior secondary,” said Aroni.
“As a legal obligation, schools that meet 75 per cent of the set requirements by the ministry will also be re-registered under the new 2-6-3-3 system of education. When we give certificates to schools we state the system of education and at the moment most of them are registered under the 8-4-4 system,” she added.
The country’s first-ever lot of Grade 7 students who wrote their Kenya Primary School Education Assessment(KPSEA) last year are expected to join JSS on January 30. A total of 15,781 Grade Six students in Nyeri wrote their KPSEA in December 2022. Out of these 13,100 are from public primary schools.
Ms Aroni has said that all 47 county directors of education as well as education officials were working to ensure that all is set for a seamless 100 per cent transition of the students from Primary Schools to the JSS come the end of this month.