Education Ministry issues guidelines on modularisation of TVET courses
By Ndiritu Wanjiru, February 5, 2026The Ministry of Education has issued guidelines on the Modularisation of Technical and Vocational training institutes, TVETS, following recent concerns raised by trainers’ unions and other stakeholders in the education sector.
The ministry has said that in the new system, long-term courses are broken into smaller ones majoring on key competencies of learners.
Speaking during a press briefing held in Nairobi on Thursday, February 6, 2026, the principal secretary for TVETs, Esther Muoria, has outlined the policy objectives of the modularisation, issuing a clarification on the cost of training and the stakeholder engagement process that the ministry is set to undertake.
The PS has insisted that with the modularisation era, students in TVETs will be subjected to a formative and not summative system, where students will be trained and examined in stages and will only be proven to succeed after being trained to perfection in a particular field of study.
“In TVETs, we only have written exams in five and six and a bit in level 4. In levels 3 and 4, we have an assessment going on as you train in what we call coming up with a portfolio of evidence. Examination of our students is formative and not summative, meaning that if a student is trained in a certain field, the student should be trained to perfection and be proven to succeed,” Muoria said.
There has been growing concern in the TVET sector with the modularisation receiving sharp criticism from the Kenya Union of Technical and Vocational Education Trainers (KUTVET), which argues the compressed structure is contributing to rising dropout rates.
The ministry has said that the students will be trained in independent modules, each focused on specific competencies. Learners complete and certify one module before progressing to the next, a model intended to speed up skills acquisition and entry into the job market.
The policy according to TVET Principal Secretary Esther Mworia, has also reduced the duration of some diploma programmes that traditionally ran for two to three years to just one year.