Mr. Peter Munga, the Chairperson of the Equity Group

REPUBLIC OF KENYA

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

SPEECH BY DR. FRED MATIANGI, CABINET SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, DURING THE COMMISSIONING OF YEAR 2017 WINGS TO FLY PROGRAMME ON 9TH JANUARY, 2017 AT THE KASARANI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE CENTRE AT 10.00 AM

Mr. Peter Munga, the Chairperson of the Equity Group,

Dr. James Mwangi, CEO, Equity Bank,

The PS, Vocational &Technical Training, Dr. Dinah Mwinzi

Equity Bank Board Members,

Education Stakeholders across the spectrum of responsibility,

Young scholars and beneficiaries of the Wings to Fly Programme,

Members of the Fourth Estate,

Ladies and Gentlemen;

This is the first major public event, in the Education Sector this year. I therefore take this opportunity to thank the Lord for the blessed opportunity of a new year, the opportunity to serve and the blessing of each one of us here today. May the Lord bless you indeed this year and may His purposes be fulfilled as all of us endeavor to make our humble contribution to the development of our beloved county.

Being the very first public event, it indeed gives me great pleasure to be with here today to preside over this noble exercise of unveiling of young, bright and needy scholars who have been awarded full high school scholarships under the Wings to Fly programme. The commissioning ceremony today ushers in the 8th cohort of the Wings to Fly programme. I would like to commend Equity Group, the MasterCard Foundation and other supporters for their commitment to this programme, which supports secondary and now tertiary education for top performing children from financially challenged backgrounds.

Further, the Wings to Fly programme complements Government efforts meant to ensure that every child gets quality basic education. I note with appreciation that the number of scholars under this program has significantly grown since its launch in 2011. This year alone, there are 1,700 beneficiaries bringing the total to 14,368 since its inception. This initiative is a good top-up to the Government’s existing programmes such as the Free Primary Education, Free Day Secondary Education, free national examinations for all candidates, enhanced capitation grant to the schools, bursaries and Constituency Development Fund. All these programmes have led to significant increase in access to all levels of education. The country now boasts of transition rates from primary to secondary schools of about 87% up from 60% in 2008.

Challenges of implementing Reforms in Kenya

We all must, once again, offer special congratulations to the 2016 young scholars who are sitting before us today as they plan to start another four-year cycle at the respective secondary schools where they will report to Form One starting today. This is because they were the first group of the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) to sit their examinations under new reform measures.

I hasten to observe that reforms of any kind attract different types of resistance. Sincere people will come with open resistance seeking to dialogue while others plan hidden resistance out of unfounded fear. Some others will even advance malicious resistance that is born of ill intentions.

I however remain very grateful to and appreciative of all the critical role players in the education sector and the public at large who sincerely realize that it is time that we in Kenya candidly confronted our challenges and collectively sought solutions to them for the sake of our children. I am particularly grateful to all our teachers, who have continued to make many efforts and sacrifices to teach and mold our children, knowing as they do that they are singularly the most influential factor in the performance and education of our children. I am particularly grateful to the about 138,000 of them who sacrificed their holiday and family time to collect examination papers from the containers at sub-county headquarters, supervise and invigilate the examination and most importantly to the team of 16,637 professionally trained and qualified teachers that spent time to diligently examine our students before we released the KCSE results. Because of your professionalism, dutifulness and resolve to make a difference, we, together achieved the objective of delivering one of the most credible examinations in the basic education sector of our country in almost a generation. On behalf of my colleagues both at the Ministry Headquarters and the rest of our agencies, we would like you, the 16,637 professionally trained and qualified teachers to know that we appreciate you, deeply respect your sense of professionalism and firmly confirm to the country that throughout the 2016 examination season, you performed a sterling job in the delivery of a credible examination result. We unreservedly vouch for you, fellow teachers for the excellent job you did. We will not, under any circumstances whatsoever, second guess and besmirch your work, belittle your professionalism or cast aspersions on your integrity merely on the basis of the overall national performance in any of those examinations.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to make special mention and pay tribute to all our head teachers who won the hearts of our nation by their deep sense of commitment and responsibility in the manner in which they conducted the exercise despite concerted effort to incite and intimidate them to refuse to pick exams from the containers and efforts to urge them to abdicate their responsibilities as the heads of their institutions and playing the role of center managers during the examination period.

The same forces that parroted such choruses of despondency are about town with a new song. Please colleagues, ignore them as you did in the past and let us prepare our children, these wonderful gifts from God to us, for life. The school calendar year has started, let us get on with our work. Let us remain focused, resist distraction. This year particularly demands greater focus, concentration and wise use of time.

Reforming the education sector of a country will not take one national examination season, one class or a simple set of policy and legislative actions. It will necessarily take a lot of time, persistent focus and collective action. It may take as long as even a generation. Many renowned education systems around the world have been built over a long period of time. Of necessity therefore we must remain honest to ourselves and, to quote Michael Gove, former British Education Secretary “stop lying to children about their life chances and allowing inflated exam grades compared to Soviet tractor production propaganda”. “I think”, continues Secretary Gove “there's no crime greater than lying to children – and that's why we need to tell them the truth."

I wish to report that the path to last year’s credible examination results was neither easy nor will they be sustained in an environment that will always be conducive. In our effort to ensure fairness, objectivity and transparency in the management of examinations, we ran into severe bottlenecks many of which I cannot afford to outline at this ceremony. All of us remember that when the Ministry of Education reorganized school term dates after broad, candid and open consultations with sector players, some quarters heavily criticized us terming the reforms “unilateral”.

When we experienced rampant school unrest in late second term of the year, some critics asked us to abruptly close schools, blaming the incidents on the tough examination rules. We declined to heed their calls since we saw the hand of examination cheating and text book sales cartels that wanted to stop us from implementing rules that could run them out of their illegal business including hawking leaked examination papers.

Once we came to Third Term 2016, we witnessed a shameful campaign that I have alluded to already, meant to dissuade head teachers from supervising examination centres. As you know, all these efforts came to naught, we ran a credible examination and released formidable results in both the KCPE and Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations. I wish to reiterate that the Ministry of Education will not be distracted by the prophets of doom who want us to return to the past unethical practices that allowed children of the rich to access stolen examinations at KCPE level. Beneficiaries of the KCPE exam leakage went on to join the best schools where they also benefitted from stolen KCSE exams only for them to flop in the competitive programmes at universities, such as medicine and engineering, to which they were admitted. We will remain firm and determined to make the difference that will level the examination playground for all Kenyan children irrespective of family status, region or tribe.

As we celebrate the transition rates and growth in access to university education, a time has come for the country to introspect and balance the production of university level graduates with a requisite pool of technical skills to support these university graduates. We must now, as a country, make the necessary adjustments to ensure a balance of skill sets to offer a seamless technical pool all the way from certificate, to Diploma, Bachelor degrees to Master's degrees.

Focus on Vocation and Tertiary Education

Ladies and Gentlemen, as you may be aware, there were 577,253 candidates who sat the KCSE exam in 2016. Of these, 88,929 scored the minimum university entry mean grade of C+ and above. As disturbing as this may seem, the results indicate that we have a large population of secondary leavers who qualify for tertiary and technical training. The time has come for us to embrace the role of tertiary and technical training in national development. We must shift from the populist view of white-collar jobs, which are highly pegged on university degree qualifications, and focus more on skills-oriented approaches that equip our youth with practical skill sets that match their aspirations and can help our country to become a middle income industrialised nation.

The historical policy miss-step of closing down middle level colleges and making them universities is one we have to be candid about and correct. Its repercussions are out there for all sincere people to see. Let us not be hypocritical. Such unwise decisions in the past created an artificial demand for university education, the most horrific consequence of which is that over 80% of our enrolled university students are in the liberal arts and humanities courses completely at variance with our development needs at this point in time. Let us be honest to one another, the massification of universities in our country has dealt a body blow to the quality of our university education. We cannot therefore continue to live a lie. We have for a long while now and it is time to start an honest journey towards the right direction in the development of our country.

The Kenya Vision 2030 champions a growing and inclusive economy, one that is fostered by strong knowledge-based sectors, particularly manufacturing and services. Achieving this vision will depend heavily on how well equipped the graduates are with 21st Century universal skills.

Ladies and Gentlemen, there are 64 operational Technical and Vocational Colleges (TVCs) out of which four are for trainees with special needs. Since 2014, the government has constructed 60 TVCs, which are complete and ready to become operational. An additional 70 TVCs are under construction and are expected to be completed by June 2017. It is in the Government’s plan to have a TVC in each constituency. Apart from construction of new TVCs, the Ministry is also in the process of equipping the existing institutions with state-of-the-art training equipment in order to attract trainees and provide them with skills that match modern-day technology.

The Ministry has an enrolment of about 140,000 trainees in the 64 operational TVCs. This number is expected to grow to about 200,000 following the ongoing rebranding of TVET and operationalization of other new colleges. There is capacity for about 400,000 Form Four leavers in TVET institutions under various government ministries.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish to encourage the youth to apply for courses in TVETs, where capacity is ever unmet. In 2015, for example, out of the 50,000 declared vacancies in various TVETs, only 12,000 applied to join TVET colleges, leaving an excess capacity of 38,000 places. It is worth noting that students who apply for TVET also qualify for HELB loans. TVET students funded in 2015 were a dismal 11,000 (396m) against a Government budget of 500m for 20,000 students. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage recent Form Four leavers to apply to our TVET institutions all over the country. We must now aggressively market and embrace the technical training opportunities if we are going to achieve the Government’s vision of developing a complementary pool of technical experts to augment the university level graduates in the technical areas.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am glad to note that that Equity Bank has widened its support to the youth of Kenya by offering support to 2,900 youth to train in TVET institutions under the Ministry of Education. The trainees will undergo short competency based courses that are skills-based and provide competence in specified skills areas. The identified trainees who will have qualified to proceed to University, will have acquired skills that will equip them for part-time employment that can potentially sustain them during their studies while other beneficiaries who will have not qualified for degree programmes will have employability and entrepreneur skills.