Every education reform begins with a promise that children will receive a better education than the generation before them.
A promise that classrooms will become spaces where curiosity is encouraged, talents are discovered, and young people acquire the skills needed to navigate an increasingly complex world.
For parents, education reforms represent hope and the possibility that their children will not only compete academically but will also develop the creativity, confidence, and practical abilities required to succeed beyond school.
For teachers, reforms often represent an opportunity to rethink how learning happens and how young minds can be better supported.
For governments, education reform is a statement about the future a nation wants to build.
Yet between the promise of reform and its reality lies the most difficult stage: implementation.
This is where even well-intentioned reforms encounter pressure. A new curriculum may provide a vision, but classrooms require enough teachers. New pathways may create opportunities, but schools require infrastructure. Policy documents may define ambition, but communities must understand and embrace the change.
Kenya’s Competency-Based Education (CBE) transition now stands at this critical point.
The country’s move toward CBE was driven by an ambition to transform learning by shifting focus from content memorisation toward competencies, creativity, critical thinking, and practical skills. The model seeks to recognise that learners possess different abilities and that education should help them develop those abilities.
It is a compelling vision.
However, the challenges emerging during implementation suggest that solving one visible problem, even a major one like teacher shortages, while so important, may not by itself guarantee success.
The future of CBE will depend on whether Kenya continually builds the wider ecosystem required to sustain the reform.
Teachers Matter, But More’s Needed
Teachers remain at the centre of any education transformation.
Without capable and adequately prepared educators, even the most progressive curriculum remains an aspiration rather than a reality.
Kenya’s teacher shortage is therefore a serious concern. The Teachers Service Commission projected that the country would require approximately 58,590 additional teachers to support the Grade 10 transition, with significant gaps expected in specialised areas linked to the new pathways. These include fields such as STEM, computer studies, aviation, and technical subjects.
The numbers matter because behind every vacancy is a learner waiting for guidance.
Student interested in technology need someone who can nurture their curiosity.
Learners interested in creative arts need mentorship and expertise.
A young person with technical ability needs an education system that recognises that talent as valuable.
But teachers cannot carry the entire responsibility of reform alone.
A well-trained teacher operating in an environment without adequate resources will still face limitations. A curriculum that demands creativity requires classrooms that allow creativity to flourish.
This is where the conversation must expand.
Reform Demands More Than Teachers
Education systems are interconnected.
While teacher recruitment is one part of the equation, successful reform also requires investment in learning environments, assessment systems, financing, leadership, and public understanding.
Recent assessments of Grade 10 preparedness have highlighted challenges beyond staffing. A rapid survey by the Elimu Bora Working Group found that only 6.3% of surveyed schools were fully staffed for Grade 10, while also identifying shortages in digital resources, specialised equipment, and textbooks.
These concerns reveal an important reality that CBE is not simply a classroom reform but a transformation of the entire education ecosystem.
Appropriate facilities and equal access to technology, spaces and resources that allow learners’ abilities to grow are key.
The success of CBE depends on whether schools can provide the environment needed for the curriculum’s vision to become a reality.
Leadership Will Shape Sustainability
Large-scale education reforms require more than policy direction. They require sustained commitment.
The government has a central responsibility in ensuring that reforms are supported through adequate financing, teacher development, infrastructure investment, and consistent implementation.
Concerns raised by education stakeholders and lawmakers have included delayed funding, infrastructure gaps, and uneven readiness among schools.
These challenges do not mean that CBE is the wrong approach.
They demonstrate that transformation requires patience, coordination, and long-term commitment.
Education reform cannot operate on short-term urgency alone. It requires the discipline to continue investing even after the attention surrounding a new policy announcement fades.
Communities Must Embrace the Shift
One of the most overlooked aspects of education reform is public understanding.
For many years, academic success in Kenya and many parts of Africa has been strongly associated with examination performance and traditional career paths.
CBE introduces a broader understanding of success.
A learner’s potential may emerge through science, technology, entrepreneurship, sports, creative industries, or technical skills.
For this vision to succeed, parents and communities must embrace the idea that talent takes many forms.
Choosing to celebrate only a narrow definition of achievement risks limiting the very creativity that CBE seeks to develop.
Industry Must Be Involved
Education cannot exist separately from the world the learners will eventually enter.
If CBE aims to prepare young people for future opportunities, employers, professionals, and industries must become active partners.
The private sector, universities, technical institutions, and professional bodies can contribute through mentorship, curriculum input, short-term internships, and exposure to real-world challenges.
The better part of these have, for years, been reserved for those undertaking higher education, but it now has to also accommodate younger learners. Beyond following one’s talents and passion, is it also not by seeing and learning from the industry that they get to develop an interest in what they want to pursue?
The classroom of tomorrow must connect with the workplace of tomorrow. Learners should understand not only what they are studying, but why it matters.
Building a Complete Reform System
Kenya’s next step should not only be closing the teacher shortage gap but building a complete CBE ecosystem.
Achieving this will require a full-circle approach: preparing and supporting teachers, equipping schools with the resources needed for different pathways, sustaining government commitment, engaging parents and communities, strengthening links between education and industry, and aligning assessments with the competencies CBE seeks to develop.
Education transformation succeeds when every part of the system moves in the same direction.
Kenya’s CBE journey is therefore about whether a nation can align its ambitions for young people with the structures required to support them.
The teacher shortage has rightly captured attention, but the bigger question is whether Kenya can create the environment in which teachers, learners, schools, and communities can thrive together.
Because the future of education is built through collective responsibility.
And the success of CBE will ultimately depend not only on who teaches, but on whether the entire society is prepared to support learning.
The government must therefore rise beyond policy announcements and take the lead in uniting every stakeholder behind this transformation. Kenya cannot ask teachers to transform education alone; it must build the conditions that allow every stakeholder to play their part. The future of millions of learners depends on whether this moment becomes a true transformation or another unfinished promise.
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Benvictor Makau is a multi-skilled Editor and Content Strategist, and a believer in the power of positive storytelling and solutions journalism in transforming society.
He’s a well-informed journalist and prolific writer on matters of Education, Literature, Health, Climate Change, and Leadership.
He is also the Founder and CEO of Benmak Virtual Assistants (www.benmakva.com), a company offering high-end virtual assistance services to professionals and their organizations across the world.
His conact: benvictorisaac@gmail.com.
Let’s connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benvictor-makau
EduTimes Africa, a product of Education Times Africa, is a magazine publication that aims to lend its support to close the yawning gap in Africa's educational development.