COMPETENCE BASED CURRICULUM (CBC)

 COMPETENCE BASED CURRICULUM (CBC) 

The Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) under the 2-6-3-3 system of education in Kenya was unveiled in 2017 to replace the 8-4-4 system of education which has served Kenya for 32 years. The introduction of 2-6-3-3 has received a lot of attention and provides an opportunity for us to reflect on the end of an Era in Kenya's Education where ranking and cut throat completion has been at the center of the sector. The anxiety that parents experienced in the past as well as the candidates was devastating and affected the country to the extent that parents engaged in cheating such as taking their children to academes but registering them for Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exams in rural public schools in order to secure national school places. There were cases where the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) reported that over 10,000 candidates 'missed' exams when the truth of the matter was that those were candidates who made double registration in academies and rural poor public schools in order to get selected to national schools. The issuance of index number one became politicized and some parents would bribe teachers in order to have their children given index number one, because some principles of high schools had the notion that index one were better than other students and wanted to populate their schools with so-called the best. So flawed was Kenya's 8-4-4 system that ranking in exams became a disease and parents moved their children from one school to another due to ranking. Private schools started bad games and gambled with lives of children by setting up at least two examination centers where weak students would be registered in different centers while clever students would be registered in flagship schools which often carried names of famous academies and ended up in the newspapers as top performers. Such schools ended up attracting many students through the deceptive notion of ranking. Spaces at national schools were competed for initially on merit but later taken up by corruption. Passing exams was not enough to earn a candidate place at prestigious national schools and soon after, many elite public schools such as Kenya High and Alliance were filled with children of who is who in Kenya, and school principals became millionaires where an admission letter was sold for as much as kshs 100,000. The resulting result was that principals used the money to grease the hands of KNEC officials in order to be rankled high. KNEC developed a system of moderation in which top schools rotated among the top ten performance for public and private schools. Education Minister Fred Matiangi and KNEC Chairman George Magoha teamed up to produce natural results without moderation and produced 'upsets' in the sector. This article will look at the problems of the old 8-4-4 education system which became examination-based, corrupt and the promises of the new CBC in Kenya, especially in addressing the promotion of the entire class to the next grade. The article will use illustrations from other countries to point out why CBC will be useful in the development of a National Qualification Framework (NQF) in which formal, non-formal and formal education will be recognized.

In Africa, AU (2021) reiterates the importance of education towards the realization of Aspiration 1 of Africa Union's agenda 2063 on social and economic transformation of the continent, by calling for significant investments in education with a view to have in place the required policy framework, human and material resources such as adequate number of trained teachers, classrooms, text books and relevant instruction materials to facilitate a prosperous Africa based on inclusive growth and sustainable development.

This need to enable sustainable development forms part of the reasons for carrying out educational reforms in Kenya (RoK, 2017). The series of reforms in the education sector in Kenya commenced with the push to entrench national goals and Africanization in the curriculum (GoK, 1964); medication of national objectives and education policies (GoK, 1976); formationa of the second University (GoK, 1981).

In Kenya, the introduction of the 2-6-3-3 competency based education cycle in year 2017 to replace the 8-4-4 system was impelled by deficiencies identified within the latter educational system (Mwarari, Githui & Mwenje, 2020;RoK, 2017).