Cabinet Secretary for Education Amb. Amina Mohamed has today finally broken the silence on the fate of the new 2-6-6-3 curriculum which has for the past few days been in limbo.
In a press briefing today, the CS announced that the new curriculum pilot will continue for another year, postponing the roll out for one more year to allow for alignment in the education sector and kick off in January 2020.
Amina Mohamed further said that her Ministry would establish a secretariat to coordinate the priorities, activities and communication of the competency based curriculum. The directorate of quality assurance & standards will be tasked to vigorously track the implementation of the competency based curriculum in all sub counties across the country and the training of quality assurance officers that will commence in February 2019.
https://twitter.com/AMB_A_Mohammed/status/1073900968377499653
The curriculum focus in the ministry will be reorganized to secure supervision and evaluation of the Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) in all private, public and special needs institutions in the country
She further said that there will be a step up in intensive teacher training programmes across the country which will commence in January 2019.
The news of the postponement of the new curriculum comes as a disappointment to many parents/guardians who claimed that they had already purchased the new textbooks for the next school term in 2019. Publishers had also lamented that they will lose billions of shillings since they had already put money in the publishing of new learning materials.
However, Education CS Ms. Mohamed has maintained that the country is not ready for the new curriculum. According to a report by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), one of the reasons they gave was that teachers were not well prepared as some still struggled with the concept of the curriculum.
The new curriculum was to be rolled out from nursery school to class three while piloting in class four was to start next year. This after two years of piloting for the lower classes who will now have to go back to the 8-4-4 system.
Do you think the students from the lower classes will be affected by reverting back to the old curriculum?