International Journal of Education and Social Science (IJESS)

Education is a tremendously important lever for ensuring competitiveness and prosperity in the age of globalization. Continuous monitoring of schools’ performance through the annual publication of league tables coupled with the glamour at education days has put pressure on secondary schools to raise the level of their students’ academic performance. As a result, improvement strategies are constantly being adopted, and among these strategies are collaboration and benchmarking. Despite these efforts, the quality of secondary school education in the Western region in particular, as indicated by Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) results over the years has been persistently very low. In 2010, only 11,995 (12.35%) of the candidates who attained the minimum university cut off grade of C+ and above were from the Western region. This indicates that most schools are ineffective when evaluated in terms of students’ academic performance. The objective of this study was therefore, to establish the effect of collaboration and benchmarking on secondary schools’ university entry grades in the Western Region. The study adopted a descriptive survey design. The target was 137 schools, formally classified as provincial schools. These schools were stratified into four categories (schools that collaborated and benchmarked, schools that only collaborated, schools that only benchmarked, schools that did neither). A total of 41 schools representing 30% were randomly selected. The sample size comprised 41 Directors of Studies and 9 DEOs representing 30% of the 31 DEOs in the Western region. Data were collected using interview schedules, questionnaires and document analysis and analysed using One-way ANOVA. Findings revealed that, schools involved in both practices had high university percentage pass grades (85.75%) during the five year period compared to those engaged in neither practice which had a very low percentage of university entry grades (12.45%). It was therefore recommended that, schools should adopt a three pronged collaboration and benchmarking process that involved schools, departments and subjects in order to maximize the benefits of the two practices.