Students of a local high school. Photo/FILE .

Thousands of candidates from private primary schools can now expect to join national secondary schools after the government scrapped the contentious quota system of admitting students into Form One.
In new rules released by the Ministry of Education, national schools will now use district quotas to pick students from public and primary schools in January.
The guidelines also scrap the provincial institutions category of schools, instead renaming them county schools, which will be allowed to select candidates from districts, counties and nationally.
The new rules will affect the 750,000 pupils who sat the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) last month.
Their examination results are expected to be released immediately after Christmas. County schools will reserve 40 per cent of their places for candidates from the regions the institutions are in.
Each of them will pick another 40 per cent of candidates from other counties.
The rest, 20 per cent, will come from the district where the school is located.
There are 47 counties in the country. The new rules are spelt out in a circular by the director of secondary education, Mr Robert Masese, on behalf of Education Permanent secretary James ole Kiyiapi.
The circular, titled Projections for Year 2012 Form One Admission to Secondary Schools, was sent to all provincial directors of education recently.
Based on the new guidelines, for instance, well performing Ng’iya Girls Secondary School in Siaya county, with a class capacity of 180 students, will select 36 candidates from Siaya district.
It will then pick 72 candidates from Siaya county and the same number from all the other 46 counties in the country.
But the school will shed the county label when it is elevated to national status in the second and third phase of the government upgrading programme.
The new district and county admission ratios are different from those proposed by the secondary school heads.
The Kenya Secondary Schools Heads Association chairman Cleophas Tirop had proposed that schools promoted to national status admit 30 per cent of Form One students from their respective counties and the rest nationally.
Mr Tirop said the new criterion would ensure all counties sent candidates to good secondary schools.