The low turnout in Grade 10 admissions is being treated, lazily and insultingly, as a mystery. A shrugging statistic. An administrative hiccup. Some temporary confusion that will sort itself out.
The government has also considered extending the deadline for admission to Grade 10 as if the root problem is that parents feel like their children didn’t have enough time for a holiday in December. It is none of those things.
It is, instead, a loud verdict on how disastrously the Kenyan state has handled the transition to the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC), and an even louder indictment of an economy so starved of cash that parents—good, responsible, historically resilient parents—have finally been brought to their knees.
CBC was sold to the country as a progressive leap. Less cramming, more thinking. Less regurgitation, more competence. Education aligned with real life. A system meant to nurture talent rather than crush curiosity.
On paper, it was a good idea. But it had visible implementation cracks that multiple stakeholders tried desperately to engage with the government on, fruitlessly at that. Ironically, the pursuit of a competence-based system has been run with breathtaking incompetence.
A competency-based curriculum requires planning, resources, teacher retraining, infrastructure, clarity, and, above all, competent stewardship. What we got instead was a rushed roll-out, chronic policy reversals, unclear pathways, contradictory communication, and parents being asked to make life-altering decisions in an environment of total uncertainty. We were told pathways would be clear. They weren’t. We were told schools would be ready. Many weren’t. We were told teachers were prepared. They’re still catching up.
A system that demands nuance and long-term thinking has been managed by people allergic to both. And now, at the first real national stress test—transition to Grade 10—the cracks are no longer cracks. They are visible fractures.
But curriculum confusion alone does not explain why over 60 per cent of eligible learners have not been admitted.
Money does. Or rather, the absence of it.
“Back-to-school” season in Kenya has always been sacred. Even in the hardest years. Even during droughts, political crises, post-election violence, and pandemics. Parents would sacrifice. Borrow. Sell. Hustle. They cut corners everywhere else so that, come January, a child could walk back into a classroom in a new uniform and with cleared balances.
That social contract is now broken down. Not because parents suddenly became irresponsible. Not because December was too indulgent. Not because people mismanaged money. But because there was no money to mismanage in the first place.
This festive season was not even festive. Anyone pretending otherwise is either lying or insulated. Businesses were slow. Casual work dried up. SMEs barely broke even. Professionals are drowning in delayed salaries, reduced incomes, or no income at all. Farmers faced poor prices. The informal sector—the real engine of this country—was gasping. Even the new year resolutions did not come with gym subscriptions.
So when January came, it didn’t meet savings. It met empty hands.
When school fees are added to rent arrears, medical bills, food inflation and transport costs that feel like extortion, education—especially when its structure and promises are so unclear—tragically becomes negotiable.
This is the quiet violence of a cash-strapped economy. It doesn’t announce itself with sirens. It shows up as a child staying home on a stage as crucial as “form one” admission. The government would like this story to be about “adjustment pains.” About parents “taking time.” About “sensitisation.”
It is not. It is about an administration that drained liquidity from the economy through aggressive taxation, unregulated borrowing, local borrowing that has drained liquidity out of the economy, and a fiscal regime that exists to enrich the politically exposed oligarchs then acted surprised when households collapsed under the weight.
It is about leaders who speak fluently about macroeconomic discipline while ignoring microeconomic suffocation. It is about asking citizens to absorb shock after shock—higher taxes, higher fuel, higher food, higher levies—while offering nothing resembling relief. It is about an economy that is growing, in GDP, whose growth filters efficiently from the top-down. Whose filtration is so ruthless, that even the middle-class risk being wiped out completely, as those at the top struggle to bleed this economy, and all who sustain it, dry.
And then standing back, baffled, when the most reliable Kenyan habit of all—prioritising education—finally buckles.
CBC is supposed to be about competence. About practical outcomes. About aligning systems with lived reality. Yet it is being administered by a state profoundly disconnected from lived reality.
Those who lived through and benefited from the 8-4-4 system, when a degree guaranteed access to well-paid employment, should not have been involved in deciding what improvements were needed in the new curriculum. They simply had no idea.
This moment should terrify policymakers, not merely because of the headlines, but because of what it signals long-term. Delayed transitions today become drop-outs tomorrow. Drop-outs become underemployment. Underemployment becomes despair. And despair, eventually, becomes instability.
Education has always been Kenya’s pressure valve. The one thing people still believed in when everything else failed. When you compromise that, you are gambling with social cohesion itself.
The solution is not PR. It is not blaming parents, or extending deadlines. It is not pretending this is a communication issue. Parents and students alike got letters, like all those before them.
It requires humility: admitting that CBC was poorly executed. It requires urgency: stabilising school funding and fee structures. It requires economic honesty: restoring cash flow to households, and not just balance sheets in Treasury presentations.
Most of all, it requires listening—to parents who are not careless, but exhausted. The low turnout in Grade 10 is a message.
