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What’s the alternative should CBE fail?
Grade 10 students and their parents queue for clearance at Nakuru High Senior School on January 12, 2026 for admission.
When the current Grade 10 learners joined Grade 7 they started on a curriculum that was still largely theoretical. They had no textbooks. Teachers were not enough for junior school and those available were improvising. Parents were confused. The system was learning, with children as the guinea pigs.
Four years later, history is repeating itself. These same learners have joined senior school only to find, once again, missing textbooks, unprepared teachers and unclear pathways.
This cohort is not a pilot group in the usual sense. They are over one million children, an entire generation subjected to an experiment whose outcomes remain uncertain. No serious system gambles so widely without safety nets.
Competency-Based Education (CBE) promised relevance, skills and flexibility. Yet today, many schools are fumbling with subject combinations, staffing and infrastructure gaps. Career guidance, a core pillar of the system, remains weak. The result is a curriculum that feels chaotic rather than empowering.
Kenya is not the first country to attempt radical curriculum reform and stumble. Australia’s Outcomes Based Education experiment in the 1990s was abandoned after teachers complained it was vague, bureaucratic and weakened academic standards.
South Africa’s Curriculum 2005, also outcomes based, was eventually scrapped and replaced after it proved too complex and poorly implemented. These countries had the institutional capacity and political courage to stop, review and redirect their reforms before an entire generation was lost.
Kenya has no clear remedy should CBE fall short. There is no publicly articulated Plan B for learners who emerge inadequately prepared, no special admissions pathways, and no structured transition into technical skills, enterprise or agriculture.
There is no shame in course correcting. Policy maturity is not stubbornness, it is responsiveness. Kenya must urgently publish a national remedial and transition framework, fast track teacher retraining and textbook provision, and open an honest national conversation on whether aspects of CBE need revision or pause. Because if this system fails, it will not be policymakers who pay the price, it will be the children.
Baraka Mumo Kilonzo
