The double intake for the pioneer Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) and Form One learners could grind the education system to a halt, former Kenya National Union of Teachers secretary-general  Wilson Sossion (above) said yesterday.

Sossion, in an interview with People Daily, warned that the education sector lacks the capacity, infrastructure and human resource to undertake the double intake set for January next year.

Commending President William Ruto’s move to form a task force to review the contentious CBC system, Sossion said it would guide the way forward on the education system.  “Kenyans have a decision to make. Even if it is throwing it out, they should not fear. After all, no CBC has been going on. The Government should scale down education reforms,” Sossion said.

Forced down

Saying his interest is to see stability in the education sector, Sossion claimed CBC is being forced on Kenyans without professional perspectives. “We want a curriculum that is exciting to learners, easy to be delivered by teachers, well resourced … and where teachers are properly recruited, supported and remunerated so that we can produce a competitive human resource,” he said.

He advocated a higher budget allocation to the Teachers Service Commission to hire 58,000 tutors, adding that Grade Six learners should move to Grade Seven in the schools they are in now.

Just before CBC’s inception, then-Education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed suspended its planned roll-out to give room for more preparation and training of teachers. But the decision was overruled and CBC was rolled out nationally in January 2019.

Saying that CBC is important, Mohamed explained that it cannot be rushed and the worst thing that could happen is to roll out something that people were not comfortable with.

“The curriculum is great, the design is great, but we need to ensure all stakeholders are comfortable before rollout is done and as per now, we are not ready. We will need to have a conference with all the stakeholders and agree on the rollout date because we want to ensure that everything is in place, the training of teachers, the infrastructure and of course making sure that the books are the right ones, ”Mohamed said in 2018.

However, the decision was overruled and CBC was rolled out nationally in January 2019.

Some of the issues raised then, which a section of stakeholders say has come to pass, included inadequate alignment between the CBC formulation, teacher capacity development, selection and supply of learning materials and assessment.

There were also concerns of a poorly planned curriculum and hastily introduced in schools, with arguments that the process did not carefully consider resource constraints.