MPs, Urban Middle Class Abandon CBC-Based Public Schools for Foreign Curricula as Confidence in National Education System Declines

MPs, Urban Middle Class Abandon CBC-Based Public Schools for Foreign Curricula as Confidence in National Education System Declines.

With Kenya struggling to fully implement its Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) that has now been rebranded as Competency-Based Education (CBE), a rising exodus of the political elite and middle-class families into international schools is revealing the cracks in the public education system.

Urban middle class workers are now turning to the foreign systems such as the British IGCSE or the American-based systems due to nagging problems of teacher shortages, funding disparities, and policy confusion that have bedeviled the CBC since its conception.

Education stakeholders have cited the development as an indication of institutional issues in the Ministry of Education and increasing discontent about how national education reforms such as the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) were being implemented.

A significant number of politicians, who are directly engaged in the education control, policy making, and authorization of the budgets, have chosen not to have their children attend schools using the Kenyan curriculum.

The trend indicates not just the lack of confidence in the reforms, but a potential increase in socioeconomic inequalities, which will put millions of students in the state education at a disadvantage.

In 2017, the CBC came to fruition to replace the long-time 8-4-4 system and was celebrated as a move to viable, skills-based education to equip Kenyan youth to better meet the needs of the global economy. But almost ten years on, the change has been affected by hurdles in its implementation.

Among the most obvious ones are terrible shortage of teachers, currently being over 100,000 across the country, and is threatening to derail the CBC expansion into senior secondary.

The deficit is especially severe in junior secondary schools (JSS) and special needs institutions, where the students with disabilities are poorly supported.

Schools in rural regions are under-funded and have limited course offerings and skewed toward STEM professions in the higher-performing schools, making arts and humanities career opportunities under-represented.

The schools being referred to as C3 and C4 are extremely limited in their subject options, as an education expert pointed out in a July 2025 analysis, as schools in the lower category have a hard time providing a wide range of choices.

Foreign curricula are attractive due to their structured nature, international accreditation and assimilation with international job markets. The IGCSE Systems such as the IGCSE provide predictability, smaller classes, and sophisticated facilities unlike the CBC which is criticized to be chaotic in terms of its rollout.

"If you talk to any one of our parliamentarians or most of them, their children are not going through our education system. They have no faith in the education system that they are talking about, says PLO Lumumba a Professor of Public Law.

The trend towards foreign curriculum is similar to the urban middle classes such as medical practitioners, engineers, lecturers, and top civil servants amongst others.

British, American and other international education systems institutions have grown at a very high rate especially in the major urban centres especially Nairobi and its environs.

The apparent increase in the number of schools that teach foreign curricula in towns and cities, means that people lack confidence in the education system.

The programs usually provided in these institutions include the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE), the British National Curriculum, the American curriculum and internationally recognised university administration routes.

The Ministry of Education has received criticism and has been accused of making inconsistent policy choices and inability to be clear in what they are doing which has led to reduced confidence with the national system.

"You listen to the people who head the Ministry of Education and you come to realize that we are in a state of confusion."

Past agreements between the Government of Kenya and other countries in the East African region to harmonise education systems have not been realised.

"Nobody now understands our education system. The Ugandans don't, the Tanzanians don't, the Rwandans don't, the Burundians don't – we also don't!".

The ambiguity of the Kenyan curriculum has been one of the factors that influence the acknowledgement and transparency of Kenyan qualifications to international scope.

As elites have the access to education of world-class standards, schools that are accessible to the general population are facing budget cuts and funding disparities, and the 2025 Kenya Junior Secondary Education Assessment (KJSEA) is the case where more than half of the students get lower scoring bands in various cycles, leading to worries about gaps in the system.

Poor families and rural ones who cannot afford their own options are left with congested classes and poorly paid teachers. The crisis spreads to the level of capitation funds, as schools get less than they are supposed to get, like KSh 16,900 per pupil rather than the expected amounts, putting additional pressure on the funds.

CBC can easily fail the coming generation when it does not tackle the fundamental issues such as teacher recruitment, equal funding and clarity of policies.

The education stakeholders and advocacy groups have called on accountability and clarity of the policy in light of the disclosures. The time has come for Kenyans to question ourselves what is wrong and this refers to the way the education sector is managed and headed.

MPs, Urban Middle Class Abandon CBC-Based Public Schools for Foreign Curricula as Confidence in National Education System Declines.