Open letter to the President
Sponsored by USAWA AGENDA

Dear Mr. President, please take personal charge to save CBC from collapse
It is with great humility that I pen this letter to you on this International Day of Education with this unique request: save the CBC from collapse. I believe that I speak for many. Our country has had many failed attempts at reforming our education system. Most of the failures, stemming from haphazard implementation and under-resourcing. The advent of the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) through an elaborately consultative process renewed hope of remedying past failures. But as you know, the implementation process was bangled by your predecessor’s regime. Haphazard implementation, departure from the CBC framework, and strongarming teachers and other critical actors in the sector to sing along while the system decayed under its belly now dog this system.
You were handed an already bangled process in which all the actions that were being taken amounted to kicking the can down the hill to save face and the day. You confronted this early in your presidency, having to immediately deal with the crisis of the transition to junior school. You provided an interim solution of domiciling Junior Secondary School learners in primary schools. It was the most pragmatic solution in the circumstances.
You then constituted the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms (PWPER), the third such a party tasked with education reforms in the country. You mandated the PWPER to among other issues, address the concerns raised by the citizenry on the implementation of CBC, and specifically the critical issue of transition from the 8-4-4 to the 2-6-6-3 system. The transition remains a formidable challenge, causing confusion and significant distress to learners, parents, private investors in education and the entire education ecosystem.
While the PWPER report made bold proposals, which may have a lasting positive impact on our education system, their proposals on the critical issue of transition from the 8-4-4 to the 2-6-6-3 system are suboptimal. We know that PWPER was confronted with many issues in relation to the implementation of the CBC as it held consultations with diverse stakeholders. But in making the recommendation to create a comprehensive school, they may have been swayed by presentations driven by insidious private interests that didn’t have the interest of learners and learning.
It is my considered opinion, for the reasons I belabour here, that despite the Ministry of Education’s best efforts and your government’s commitment to redressing past mistakes, staying on the course we are on may amount to continuing with kicking the can down the hill. We will reach the bottom of the hill at the end of this year and we will need to kick the can up the hill. Mr. president, you do not want this mess that you were handed to burst into flames in your hands. A collapsing education system is neither good economics, good politics nor good development.
In our analysis, successful implementation of CBC, or indeed any curriculum switch, requires four things:
§ Clear agency
§ Fidelity to the plan
§ Focus on the overall goal
§ Adequate funding.
In our view, while the PWPER report is overall useful in fixing some of the enduring challenges bedevilling the education sector, it does not align the CBC implementation to these key factors. In this letter, I focus on the most salient ones and make suggestions on how to resolve them.
1. Key Issues of Concern
A closer examination of the implementation of this crucial transition reveals several concerning issues:
i) Lack of a dedicated agency responsible for steering this transition, resulting in poor coordination and lack of accountability, which are essential for successful reform.
ii) Infidelity to the CBC framework has clouded the original vision and is causing setbacks in achieving the desired outcomes, which could abort the whole reform process.
iii) Unpredictable and fragmented funding for the transition, leading to delays in financial allocation and disbursement. This is mostly because the CBC implementation commenced without a costed implementation plan, which should have been a major factor in assessing implementation readiness. Consequently, the resources needed to implement aren’t available in sufficient amounts and in a timely manner.
iv) Inadequate number and diversity of teachers and infrastructure deficiencies in schools. This situation undermines the ability of these schools to provide a high-quality education, yet junior school is critical to the success of the CBC.
2. Structure for implementing CBC
PWPER report recommends under section 2.4.2 (1), adoption of a 2-6-3-3-3 Education Structure, which is in line with the CBC framework as designed and recommends the establishment of a Comprehensive School system. While we have been told that the train has left the station on this one, I hold a different view. The correct metaphor is that of the plane leaving the runway. Mr. President, you are the pilot of this plane, but one engine of this plane has malfunctioned after take-off. Please return this plane to the runway and fix the faulty engine.
WE PROPOSE that you reverse the policy on establishment of a Comprehensive School system for the following reasons:
1. It deviates from the designed CBC framework, which was well-reasoned, and undermines the principles upon which the framework and thus the new curriculum was founded.
2. Primary schools lack some critical infrastructure – laboratories in particular. It will be more costly to build the required infrastructure in these schools than to expand the capacity of the existing secondary schools to accommodate junior school learners.
3. Primary schools lack staff with the requisite content mastery to teach junior secondary. In response to this, the government has deployed intern teachers (graduates trained as secondary school teachers). If this state is made permanent, it will raise managerial challenges for school heads, especially so because teachers of the different levels are remunerated differently. But it also denies the government the opportunity to optimally use the same teachers, who are qualified in teaching at the Senior School, where teacher shortages continue to persist.
4. The lack of capacity in the current junior schools, worsened by the fact that most schools received interns specialised in languages and humanities, negates the publicly stated aspiration to have 60% of Junior School learners transition to STEM career pathways in Senior School. We conducted a survey of 525 schools in the second week of December 2024 and established that 79% of teachers posted to our junior schools are Humanities teachers, 35% of the junior schools did not have a single science teacher. This means that all the children in the 35% of the schools are predestined for the humanities pathway at senior level.
5. One of the arguments for keeping junior school learners in primary school was that the children are too young to go boarding school. Junior school was designed to be a day school to allow parents, teachers and children to interact regularly so that parents and teachers can guide learners on career pathways from a point of consultation, knowledge and understanding.
6. Given the critical role of the Junior School level in laying the foundation for selection of career pathways at Senior School, the learners in these schools should be taught by experienced teachers, capable of engaging with parents some of whom are headstrong, around the pathways that their children should pursue.
In the light of these challenges, WE PROPOSE A RECATEGORISATION of public secondary schools based on the pre-8-4-4 model, where depending on capacity, some schools offered education only up to O-level, some offered both O-level and one stream of A-level (Arts) while others offered O-level, and two streams of A-level (Arts and Sciences). The equivalent should happen today as follows:
1. Category 1: Junior School;
2. Category 2: Junior School and Senior School (Humanities stream);
3. Category 3: Junior School and Senior School (Humanities and STEM streams); and
4. Select TVET institutions: Senior School (Technical stream).
This option has four advantages:
1) Enables junior school to be generally a day school as is envisaged in the framework, to allow constant interaction between learners, parents and teachers so that teachers and parents can jointly guide the learners as they prepare to choose their career paths in senior school.
2) It is easy to implement because majority of our secondary schools are day. Over 65% of our secondary schools are day and to the best of my understanding, it is the policy of government to progressively move out of boarding school to day schools. We can start by making Junior school learners day scholars in all our secondary schools.
3) Alleviates the looming, catastrophic shortage of teachers and facilities for the technical stream of senior school, which none of the schools currently has sufficient capacity to offer.
4) Allows us to use the surplus capacity in TVET institutions, many of which have under-capacity enrolment numbers. But also having TVETs produce learner who go directly to the university will cure the false narrative that TVETs are for failures.
Mr. President, please consider placing the current grade 9 learners in the nearby secondary schools. From the data we have, over 60% of the primary public schools have a secondary school within walking distance. This switch is still possible and necessary for the following reasons:
1. Current form two learners are approximately 1,143,000, which implies that they left more spaces in secondary schools this year than required by the grade 9, who are approximately 1,030,000 and space in the teachers’ schedules;
2. While primary schools have managed to squeeze in grade 9 learners, this is taking place at the expense of causing great systemic stress with potentially dire long-term consequences;
3. The ongoing construction of additional classrooms in these schools is exacting undue and untimely financial pressure on the government that could be avoided and the funds channeled towards preparing for senior school. Lack of preparation for senior school will lead us to the bottom of the hill from where we will have no place to kick the can to. Again Mr. President, you don’t want this to happen under your watch;
4. The ongoing recruitment of teachers will not remedy the teacher shortage in the current junior schools. From our data, most of the schools currently have three JSS teachers. An additional 25,000 only puts one more teacher in each school, which will not cure the shortage based on diversity of the learning areas that teachers can competently handle and the fact that many of these school have more than one stream of each grade of junior school learners;
5. The idea that we can rationalise teachers in secondary schools and send some of them to primary schools is impractical especially with respect to the current grade 9 because that is a long, arduous process that is fraught with a myriad challenges;
6. PWPER’s proposal for the Ministry of Education to develop a framework for resource sharing, is difficult to implement in the obtaining circumstances. It could herald debilitating administrative challenges in the context where capitation that funds provision of the services is sent to schools with the learners and not those with the resources that are supposed to be shared. Importantly, it will diminish accountability for public school resources and result in their calamitous mismanagement;
7. The decision to transition grade 9 to secondary schools and ceasing construction of classrooms in primary schools will allow the government to focus the limited resources available to building more classrooms, labs and libraries in sub-county schools to expand their capacity to fully transition into junior and senior schools — many don’t know what they will be in the obtaining scenario because they are incapable of becoming senior school in the true sense of the word;
8. Mr. President, you can allow and encourage private schools, which have already invested in building facilities for junior school to continue to operate and continue investing to host both junior school and senior school learners to their optimal capacities. This will remove the uncertainty that has gripped the investors in the sector and unlock investment that would help alleviate the tension that this transition is causing the public education subsector.
3. Focus on Equitable Access and Inclusion in Education
Chapter six of PWPER report contains commendable proposals towards promoting equitable access and inclusion in education. However, the recommendations reflect a tunnel vision in situational analysis. Issues of equity have been narrowly defined to include special needs education, adult learning, and learners in marginalised areas. Other socioeconomic factors such as teenage pregnancy, poverty and insecurity in some areas have not been considered. Yet they are salient issues. For instance, survey by Usawa Agenda in 2023 reports that only 58% of teenage mothers returned to school despite the government’s active policy to encourage them to do so.
In the light of these, WE PROPOSE:
1. Full implementation of the school feeding program and ensure every school-going child gets at least one meal a day at school;
2. Enforce strict school establishment guidelines to ensure consolidation of resources rather than spreading resources thin across multiple schools within close proximity of each other. It should be possible Mr. President, with the weight of your office, to cause consolidation of some of the already established schools;
3. Establish a programme to support teenage mothers with childcare to enable them to re-enter school after delivery;
4. Enforce strict transparency and accountability of all actors in the management of the education sector for all-inclusive partnerships that enable productive collaboration — our education costs can be lower with greater transparency and frugality of the critical actors;
5. Direct the review of policies to open up schools to public scrutiny to avoid a situation where they become black holes in which children endure untold suffering to the extent in some cases, of damaging their characters.
4. Focus on Laws Governing Basic Education
One key actor whom changes to the laws must empower is the parent. Parents bear 42% of the cost of education in Kenya but they have absolutely no say on what happens most of the time. The current parental engagement framework has gaps. It is designed for the city parent, who is assumed to prefer busying him/herself with other pursuits to supporting their child’s learning activities. The city parent is not the typical Kenyan parent. The typical parent is available to the child but lacks capacity to support the child with schoolwork as is currently demanded. Secondly, the parent is disempowered partly due to the economic situation since most parents are poor, anti-parent policies that minimise parental interaction with the school and the teachers, and the limiting legal framework.
WE PROPOSE reviewing the Basic Education Act 2013 to strengthen the role of parents in the operations of schools beyond their current peripheral roles to include a framework to support the government in demanding accountability of school managers. This has three advantages:
1) It can avert the ugly incidents of violent confrontations between school managers and parents, often witnessed when schools don’t perform well in national examinations;
2) Give a sense of ownership to communities, who in most cases were the founders of the schools and encourage their continued support of the schools’ development;
3) It reflects the best practices such as what prevails in Sobral Municipality in Brazil, which has become a global centre of reference for their excellence in education.
Parental empowerment & engagement in particular, remains constrained by the Basic Education Act (2013), which has incapacitated Parents Associations’ resource mobilisation efforts. This leaves their activities at higher levels in limbo and at the mercy of school heads at the school level, since they cannot even call a parents’ meeting without the approval of the school head.
Section 7.5.2(5) recommends an amendment to Section 20(1)(a) of the Basic Education Act. This amendment suggests the removal of the requirement for an educationist with at least five years of experience based in the county to serve as the chair of the County Education Board (CEB). Instead, it proposes that the County Commissioner should assume the role of the chair. Additionally, it suggests the deletion of Part II of the Basic Education Act, which pertains to the establishment and operations of the National Education Board. The rationale for these proposals is to address redundancy and streamline the educational governance structure. These proposals are problematic besides one of them conflicts with the constitution. The County Commissioner for instance reports to the PS, Ministry of Interior. Will this be the reporting line of the County Education Board?
WE PROPOSE that these proposals be overlooked, the National Education Board established and its mandate broadened to backstop the implementation of the CBC through all levels and advise the PSs and the CS accordingly.
Section 7.5.2(19) recommends the coordination of bursaries and scholarships under a unified legal framework, known as the “Management of Scholarship and Bursaries in Basic Education Bill.” The intention is to streamline the management of financial support for students. We applaud the proposal but would like more decentralisation to foster efficiency, transparency, equity and accountability.
WE PROPOSE a decentralised structure that runs from the national to the ward through the county, and sub-county levels. The ward level committees should be responsible for working with the communities to identify the needy cases, ascertain their level of need, award the funds allocated to the ward and make public the list of beneficiaries and their respective schools for verification and accountability. Such Committees should be populated by reputable members of the community on voluntary basis and for specified periods of time. The ward level Committees should be allowed to mobilise additional resources to enhance their bursary funds kitties, provided that such funds are also channelled through the same structure and fully accounted for.
Mr. President, if you sort out this CBC implementation conundrum that you were handed, you will have lifted a significant amount of weight off many Kenyans’ shoulders and set up this country for future success through education. I don’t want to imagine the opposite. Best of luck Sir!
Emmanuel Manyasa
Executive Director - Usawa Agenda