THE INFLUENCE AWARENESS OF THE RE-ENTRY POLICY ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF RE-ADMITTED TEENAGE MOTHERS IN KENYA

Abstract

Teenage pregnancy is a global concern and interventions have been undertaken by governments to return them to school. In Kenya, it is established that over 380,000 school girls between the ages of 12-18 get pregnant annually constituting 18.1%. The purpose of the study, was to analyze whether the awareness of re-entry policy influences the academic performance of teenage mothers in secondary schools in Kenya. The study found out that several issues within awareness may contribute to academic performance of teenage mothers within the re-entry policy that include; a public awareness on teenage mother’s re–admission to school and some persons in the society were against the re- admission of teenage mothers back to school. Further, the re-entry policy of teenage mothers had inconsistent guidelines and how schools are to support the teenage mothers. Lastly, many teenage mothers drop out of school due to lack of awareness of the re-entry policy leading to failure of the policy. KEY WORDS: academic performance, re-entry policy, teenage mothers