Shock as 5,000 schools unable to enlist learners
By Mercy Kachenge, July 18, 2025Over 5,000 secondary schools failed to admit learners during the senior school selection, deepening inequalities within the education system even as reforms under the Competency Based Curriculum continue to take root.
The revelation was made by Basic Education Principal Secretary Julius Bitok, during the release of a State of Education report at Safaricom-M-PESA 2025 Education Summit.
He termed it a national concern that demands a radical rethinking of how Kenya allocates and manages educational resources.
“From the selection results, we’ve seen clearly that over 5,000 schools out of 9,750 did not get any learners selected. This data tells us something. It calls for a national conversation on how we optimize our educational resources,” Bitok said.
Failure to attract
Most of these affected institutions are county or day schools, many of them in underserved and rural regions.
Their inability to attract learners stems from a number of issues, including poor infrastructure, limited teaching staff, geographical isolation, and perceptions of low prestige.
Still the ministry maintains there is adequate capacity to absorb all 1.2 million learners transitioning into senior school under the CBE framework. What’s broken, it appears, is the distribution and attractiveness of learning opportunities, not necessarily the number of spaces available.
Bridging the gap, Bitok highlighted efforts to overhaul the placement process using a digital driven system, modeled after the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) university placement framework. This new model promotes regional equity, ensuring even the most prestigious of Kenya’s 205 national schools admit learners from all 398 sub-counties assuring every learner will get placed.
Systematic challenge
However, the issue of under enrolled schools exposes a persistent and systemic challenge in terms of education inequality. Popular schools, mainly former national and extra county schools, continue to dominate preference, leaving thousands of others underutilized and underfunded.
Addressing structural disparities, Bitok outlined government interventions including recruitment of 76,000 new teachers with an additional 24,000 set to be hired this financial year, construction of 13,000 classrooms and fast tracking of 1,600 science laboratories, especially in arid and semi-arid (ASAL) counties.
Other interventions include distribution of 1.2 million digital devices and training of over 90,000 teachers in ICT integration. Also upgrading of school data systems from NEMIS to KEMIS, enabling real time decision making and also government banking on public-private partnerships to complement its efforts.
USAWA Agenda Executive Director Emmanuel Manyasa said the situation is dire in sub-county schools recently reclassified to offer two CBE pathways in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and Social Sciences.