The newly introduced Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) system of education is set to see a shake up in the number of years learners spend at every stage of the learning process.
In the new system, government plans to increase the number of years one spends in primary school to nine and reduce secondary school education duration to three years.
This way, the government expects to reduce the cost of putting up new classrooms for learners in the junior secondary section.
The government wants to implement the proposal by classifying the junior secondary section comprising grades seven, eight and nine under the primary section in the new competency-based curriculum.
This will leave the secondary section with only grades 10, 11 and 12. Under the arrangement, learners in grades 7, 8 and 9 (the current form one) will be taught by primary schoolteachers.
This comes amid harsh resistance of the new system from the Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut).
The union’s Secretary General Wilson Sossion, other than charging teachers to boycott training for the new curriculum, also published an advertisement with local dailies reiterating that the new system is illegal.
“There is no statutory instruments to anchor the exercise, no Commission gazetted to manage the process, and the exercise is in total contravention of Public Participation Act (2018),” said Mr Sossion.
“Worse still, it is laughable that the Ministry of Education while reforming the Education Curriculum, benchmarked with countries like Tanzania, South Africa, Malaysia, Zanzibar, Ghana, Uganda, Burundi, among others where CBC has failed. Kenya also benchmarked with South Sudan which borrowed the 8-4-4 Education system,” he added.
This is while Knut officials in Kakamega and Makueni were arrested for to the boycotting the process.