How CBE Is Changing the Measure Of Success In Kenya’s School Rankings

For decades, results day in Kenya meant one thing: a number. A school’s mean score decided whether it ended up on the front page or in the footnotes, and whether parents queued at its gate the following January. That number is now gone.

When the Ministry of Education released the first Kenya Junior School Education Assessment (KJSEA) results in December 2025, it marked a clear break from the old KCPE, which gave candidates marks out of 500 and then a grade.

In its place, learners are placed in four performance levels: Exceeding, Meeting, Approaching and Below Expectation, each split into two sub-levels to form an eight-point scale.

There is no total and no aggregate. Each subject stands alone. The Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) says the design is deliberate: a child’s strength in one subject should not be overshadowed by weakness in another.

The old arithmetic made sense for the old system. Under 8-4-4, every learner studied the same subjects, so a single score out of 500 was enough to slot them into a national, extra-county or county school.

Under CBE, learners head into senior school to specialise. KNEC chief executive Dr David Njengere has argued that they need to know their strengths in particular subjects, not a combined total.

Not every school got the message. Within days, parents in several counties reported receiving documents from schools showing mean scores, aggregate points and league-style rankings. KNEC moved quickly, calling the analyses fake and misleading.

It said they wrongly assigned aggregate scores and school means, practices that do not exist under KJSEA. Njengere put it bluntly: “KJSEA does not provide an aggregate score.”

The pushback has a history. Kenya has tried to kill school rankings before. Years ago, then KNEC chief executive Paul Wasanga banned the publication of rankings, saying schools were forcing weaker students to repeat classes to protect their mean scores, and some principals were poaching bright students from other schools.

Rankings, he noted, had also been a powerful marketing tool, particularly for private schools. That is part of why the habit has been so hard to break.

Parents, meanwhile, are still finding their feet. On results day, many said they struggled to make sense of the new grading, and the confusion spilled onto social media. Official results are available only through the KNEC portal or by SMS.

The shift is not finished. The pioneer cohort is now in Grade 10, and their final Kenya Certificate of Basic Education scores will combine school-based assessments with a national summative exam in Grade 12.

How schools market themselves once those results arrive is the real test. Some commentators have also warned that an eight-point scale with marks behind each level could tempt schools back toward ranking learners.

For now, the message from the exam’s council is simple. The mean score is dead, and a school that publishes one is making it up.

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