Curtains comes down on KCPE: The hits and misses of the 39-year old exam

For the 39th and final time, parents and pupils celebrated the release of the KCPE results, a tradition that has always accompanied the tail end of the first eight years of education under the 8-4-4 curriculum.

That curriculum is now coming to its end for the primary education part of the 8-4-4 system.

The 8-4-4 system of education was born in 1985 when the first group of pupils sat the KCPE exams when Kenya switched from the previous 7-4-2-3 system to the then-new 8-4-4. 

The 8-4-4 system was introduced by the late former president Daniel Arap Moi, with the intention of improving the quality and relevance of education in the country. 

“The thinking about 8-4-4 was to bring about the realisation of the education system that endorses the learners with the necessary skill, attitude, and competencies to be able to manage themselves within the wide spectrum of life. The system before that was more theoretical, so they wanted a more practical approach,” explains Boaz Waruku, Strategy Policy Advisor at Elimu Bora.

While the intentions were noble, the execution of the changeover contributed to its fate. It was sudden, unstructured and with no new curriculum in terms of learning content.  

The old content was compressed to fit the new structure, leading to a stretched workload for pupils and students in primary and secondary school.

The emphasis on good performance in the primary exit exams heightened competition as that result meant placement in good schools. 

This competition also piled pressure on the higher learning institutions with the previous Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) path of career progression getting dropped by the wayside in favour of the cutthroat university scramble.

“Good or not bad, it is the system that has produced the people that we have, the products we are seeing are the products of 8-4-4,” adds Waruku.

The 8-4-4 system has received its fair share of both criticism and praise, but as the years passed by, the shortfalls seemed to outweigh the good, leading to numerous attempts to review and fix the curriculum through a number of commissions, whose recommendations eventually led to the birth of the current CBC system.

The curtains fall on the 8-4-4 system primary sector after a total of 26 million pupils have gone through the exams in 39 cohorts. 

The first batch of KCPE candidates, numbering 330,370, sat the maiden exam in 1985, the numbers increasing steadily through the decades. 

The first half-a-million mark was achieved in 2001, with 508,946 candidates taking the exams, in 2018, the country registered 1 million pupils for the exams, which closed that chapter of KCPE with a record 1.4 million candidates who sat and received their results in 2023. 

The last cohort of the system will sit the final Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams in 2027.