Students boarding a bus
The National Examination and School Inspection Authority (NESA) has warned to take tough measures on head teachers who assume the responsibility of placing students joining Senior1 and Senior 4 in new schools.
The warning was made September 6, 2023 at the launch of a nationwide campaign to educate head teachers, students and parents on the new examination grading system, student’s placements procedures following several complaints from parents.
The law gives NESA exclusive authority for grading examinations, placement and orientation of students joining the first and the fou year of secondary school
The law also stipulates that any placement done outside this framework is illegal, a violation and cannot be recognized by NESA.
And this can result in punitive legal actions to be taken accordingly, and these include slapping culprits with heavy fines (between Rwf500,000 and not more than Rwf1million).
However, according to NESA Director General, Dr. Bernard Bahati, there have been a number of cases indicating that Head teachers violate the order to give parents favors of placing graduate students into their schools.
“It is the mandate of NESA to place students (S1 and S4) and not a mandate of school head teachers,” Bahati said.
He gave an example of some noticed bad practices where some schools are asked to declare positions available and instead give a small number to later on fill in the remaining vacancies (withheld ones) under private arrangements.
Bahati said that this grooms a culture of favoritism and thus damages the whole new process of placing students in schools they applied for- a process that is done by an automated digital system called the School Data Management System(SDMS).
Article 45 of ministerial order governing student’s placements follows three procedures: student’s grades, choices of schools, and number of vacancies available in the schools.
The new SDMS grades students according to their performance and places them in schools of their first or second choices depending on the final grades and aggregates attained.
Some of the Education officers and Head Teachers who spoke to KTPress said that they were not aware of the way the system operates but the campaign enlightened them on key issues to address in future.
“It takes time to rectify things but this will help us to explain how the selections, grading and placements were done especially when parents and students are not satisfied with the outcomes,” said Eugene Lambert Riziki, the Education officer in Kinyinya Sector, Gasabo district.
NESA says that the SDMS system is built in a way that all this information is digitally channeled to the students and parent’s contact phone (in USSD phone format) and accessible online for results slips and placements.
For rural parents this is an advantage to easily access school results and slips unlike in the past where they used to travel to NESA offices in Kigali to collect or requisition the result slips and placements.
