Education in crisis: Grade 10 admission numbers dont add up
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
18 January 2026
There were 1.13
million candidates who sat for the inaugural Kenya Junior School
Education Assessment in 2025 (KJSEA2025). These children are now
starting their senior school education in the former secondary schools.
The final 8-4-4
cohort is now in form 3 in the same secondary schools. These form 3s sat
for they Kenya Certificate of Primary Education examinations in 2023
(KCPE2023). There were about 1.4 million candidates in KCPE2023.
Ordinarily, the
number of children in each successive year is more than in the previous
one. To illustrate the point further, here are the candidatures in the
final six years of KCPE: 2018 1,052,364; 2019 1,083,456 (up 3% from
previous year); 2020 1,179,192 (up 9%); 2021 1,225,507 (up 4%); 2022
1,233,852 (up 0.6%); and 2023 1,406,557 (up 14%).
This normal upward
trend seems to have reversed: there were more candidates in KCPE2023
(1.4 million) than in KJSEA2025 (1.13 million). To make this anomaly
clearer, we recall that the KCPE2023 group were in standard one in the
year 2016 while the KJSEA2025 started their primary school education
also in Std 1 in 2017. It will be remembered that the roll-out of the
Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) nationally started in 2019 when the
pioneers were going to Std 3 they entered Grade 3 under the new
education system.
So, unless there was
a major event that caused a population inversion in Kenya, the inaugural
KJSEA should have recorded more candidates than the final KCPE.
Strangely, the 1,130,459 KJSEA2025 candidates are even fewer than the
number registered for KCPE five years ago, 2020! Still, it worth noting
that there was an unusually high jump in the KCPE numbers 14 per cent.
Now, since there were
20 per cent fewer candidates in KJSEA2025 than in KCPE2023 we would
naturally expect that each senior school will admit about 20 per cent
fewer grade 10 students in 2026 than it admitted in form 1 in 2024.
Contrary to this expectation, we have seen nearly all national and extra
county schools getting more grade 10s than the form 1 class of 2024.
Some have seen up to 50 per cent more.
My question then is:
where did these extra children come from? The answer is: from the
sub-county day-schools. It explains we have started getting reports of
sub-county schools with less than five grade 10s!
The day-schools now
face closure for lack of students while the boarding schools are
bursting at the seams due to congestion. This is a national crisis
created by the ministry of education. Unfortunately, I dont have a
suggestion for a solution.
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