CBC or Parents’ Homework: Kenya’s Curriculum Growing Burdensome

By Kurian Musa
The promise of Kenya’s Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) was noble: nurturing practical skills, creativity, critical thinking, and learner-centered education.
It aimed to replace the rigid exam-oriented 8-4-4 system with one producing learners capable of solving real-world problems.
Yet, several years into implementation, many parents and caregivers are increasingly asking a difficult question: Why does CBC feel more burdensome than empowering?
For many households, CBC has become synonymous with endless assignments, surprise levies, and parental involvement that sometimes overshadows the learner’s own participation.
Parents are no longer merely facilitators of education; many now feel like co-teachers, project supervisors, and even manufacturers of learning materials.
A common frustration is the frequent demand for items and money outside the officially communicated school fees structure. One week, a learner is asked to bring a face mask, gloves, a gunia sack, two eggs, and Ksh 350 for a class activity. Another week, it may be cardboard, paint, cartons, seeds, or assorted household materials.
The unpredictability leaves parents anxious and constantly guessing what next will be required.
In a difficult economic climate, such recurring and unplanned demands place unnecessary strain on families already struggling with the cost of living.
The situation becomes more puzzling when one considers boarding schools. If CBC is uniformly implemented nationally, do boarding school learners receive the same practical tasks despite spending most of their time within school compounds? Or has the burden become disproportionately heavier for day-school parents because learners return home daily? This inconsistency raises questions about whether CBC implementation has been standardized across institutions.
Equally concerning is the extent to which parents now participate in assignments. It is common to find mothers and fathers spending evenings constructing models, drawing charts, sewing costumes, or assembling projects while the learner watches.
In some cases, parents end up completing the entire task to avoid embarrassing the child in school. Consequently, the competence being assessed may not necessarily belong to the learner but to the adult at home.
This defeats the fundamental philosophy of competency-based education. CBC was designed to cultivate independence, creativity, and practical ability among learners.
If adults are the ones executing assignments, then the system risks measuring parental capacity rather than learner competence.
Worse still, learners from disadvantaged backgrounds may suffer because their parents lack time, resources, literacy skills, or technical know-how to assist with projects.
The challenge may not lie in the CBC concept itself, but in how it has been implemented. Teachers may not have received sufficient retraining to align pedagogy with the intended learner-centered approach.
Some educators continue to transfer excessive responsibility to parents instead of guiding learners to undertake manageable, age-appropriate activities within school environments.
In many schools, project work appears poorly moderated, inconsistently supervised, and inadequately contextualized to the realities of ordinary Kenyan families.
There is also the issue of assessment credibility. Do CBC examiners truly understand how learners across different schools were taught? Is pedagogy uniform enough to guarantee fairness in evaluation? If implementation differs significantly between schools, then assessment standards risk becoming unreliable.
A national curriculum cannot succeed if its delivery depends largely on the interpretation, creativity, or resourcefulness of individual teachers and parents.
CBC still holds transformative potential for Kenya’s education system. However, for it to work effectively, stakeholders must revisit its implementation framework. Teachers require continuous retraining.
The writer is a Master of Research and Policy Student at Egerton University.