Transition to the competence-based curriculum from the phasing-out 8:4:4 system of education comes with envy from the expected quotas. The envy, laced with admiration, will run for 10 months in schools where the past meets the future.
The pain of the transition extends beyond schools to families. Parents with children in junior secondary school and primary school are reporting a costly sibling race for smartness.
Parents are spending more of their hard-earned shilling on juniors than seniors. It's a real-time echo of the advertisement, 'Who is Smarter Now?' The neatness comes at a price higher than most parents had anticipated.
The older child in Std 8 wears torn or fading pair of trousers and old shirts. Families hope the old clothes will take pupils through the next 10 months before they sit the KCPE examination. The last Kenya Certificate of Primary Education examination is due in November.
In the 12 sampled schools, younger children in Grade 7, or junior secondary school, wear new pairs of long trousers, cotton shirts, ties, and sweaters. Shining pairs of shoes and socks complete the school uniform for junior secondary school learners.
Their Std 8 seniors trudge ahead in old short trousers, shirts and skirts. Parents, guardians and sponsors spend about Sh15,000 to kit their younger children. Much more will be spent on books and other requirements to nurse the transition.
Grade 7 pupils are the pioneers of the new system of education that emphasises on the acquisition of skills for earning livelihoods. They have found a home in their old primary schools, even though they are in a junior secondary class.
The transition pupils will meet again in senior secondary schools in 2025. The seniors will find an opportunity to bully the juniors who tormented them for a year with transitional smartness in primary school.
Education takes a bottom-up trajectory. Such, are the undercurrents and ironies of the troubled transition.
The conflicts, however, go beyond uniforms and accommodation. The challenges are deeper and fundamental to the transition.
Junior secondary school learners are two weeks in school, but in some cases, teachers have not turned up to give them direction. Either because new teachers are yet to be posted to the schools, or other teachers are not sure how to handle the transition.
In some schools only one new teacher has been posted. Primary 1 teachers will have to complement the staff component to ensure 12 subjects for junior secondary school are taught.
The crisis of staffing is felt more in schools that have six teachers, including the headteacher, for all the eight classes. This, though, as trained teachers wait for the Teachers Service Commission to employ them.
New teachers have not been posted to some schools, even though they have a junior secondary school class. Teachers will have to find out how to keep the pupils busy, as they wait for more staff members and books.
The 35,000 new teachers expected to be employed this year are hardly enough to bridge the staffing tap. More teachers are retiring; others are changing jobs, as others shift to private schools.
These contradictions are not the only hurdles for CBC. The government will have to rethink access to education and prepare for the heavy cost of reclaiming falling standards.
Understaffed schools need more personnel to midwife the transition. Dilapidated and congested schools need more classrooms and sanitation facilities to give pupils an enabling learning environment.
Ultimately the costly investments must show CBC is a superior system to the phasing-out 8:4:4.