KUCCPS: TVET COLLEGES CAN ENLIST ALL QUALIFIED STUDENTS
The Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) has assured education stakeholders that technical training institutions in the country have enough capacity to admit all qualified students.
KUCCPS Chief Executive Officer Dr. Agnes Mercy Wahome says, while 688,591 students attained mean grades of between C and E in the 2023 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination, TVET institutions have provided 790,479 admission slots for placement.
“The country has enough capacity take care of all Kenyans,” she noted while addressing participants at the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) TVET Consultative Forum in Naivasha, Nakuru County.
At the same time, Dr. Wahome observed that programmes offered in some institutions were not up to date with the current trends. She cited Irrigation System Installation courses, which none of the institutions offeres despite Agriculture being a priority sector in the Kenyan Government’s Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA). Media and communication courses in some of the institutions did not include latest trends such as drone photography or videography which are nowadays required, she added.
Dr. Wahome also expressed concern with the low number of students applying for courses offered in government TVET institutions. Most of the students who qualified for TVET programmes had not applied by the time the KUCCPS application portal closed on March 4, 2024. Candidates who scored E in the 2023 KCSE examination were the most affected as a majority of them had not submitted application for placement. “The system will open again in about a week or two to mop up more applicants, ” she told the participants.
The theme of the two-day forum was: “Leaving No Student Behind: Aligning TVET Student Funding amidst Education Sector Reforms for Sustainability.”
