Thousands of Grade 10 transfer requests were rejected even before the transfer window was closed, much to the disappointment – and in some cases anger – of parents and learners. While the government maintains that there was never a guarantee that transfers would be approved, the scale of the rejections raises serious questions about how realistic the original placements were.
PS Julius Bittok (on the left) consulting Education Secretary Julius Ogamba during the release of KJSEA Results on 11th December.
Photo:Courtesy
The official position is that placements were done strictly based on learners’ choices. We have even been told that a learner being placed in a day school more than 100 kilometres away from home was still the learner’s own choice.
But if this is true, one question remains unanswered:
Why would learners deliberately choose day schools located hundreds of kilometres from their homes, fully aware that placement in those schools was a real possibility?
The answer lies in how the selection process was conducted.
Before selection began, senior schools were given an opportunity to indicate the pathways and subject combinations they would offer. However, as this process was ongoing, junior school learners were simultaneously required to select their subject combinations from a pool of hundreds of possible combinations and then choose senior schools — without knowing which schools would actually offer those combinations.
The assumption, both by learners and teachers, was that most senior schools would offer most combinations. That assumption turned out to be false.
When the actual lists of subject combinations were finally released, many learners discovered that the schools they had selected did not offer the combinations they had chosen. Teachers were then forced into damage control. Faced with a choice between altering a learner’s career-defining subject combination or changing the school, they opted to tamper with the school instead.
In simple terms, learners were pushed to select any school — near or far — that offered their chosen combination. Geography, distance and practicality became secondary to academic survival.
By the time placement was done, the system simply reflected those “choices”. On paper, it looked like a learner had willingly chosen a distant day school. In reality, that choice had been forced by a flawed and poorly sequenced selection process.
This is why many learners now find themselves stranded in schools they never truly intended to attend. And it is precisely why so many transfer requests have followed — and why their blanket rejection feels deeply unfair.
Calling these placements “learner choices” ignores the context under which those choices were made. The system did not just fail learners; it cornered them, then blamed them for trying to escape.
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