Sharp differences between stakeholders in the education sector over the new curriculum played out at a public forum in Nairobi.
The speakers clashed during the Transform Kenya Basic Education forum that was held at the Strathmore Business School on Tuesday evening.
Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut) Secretary General Wilson Sossion disagreed with education experts and representatives of parents on how the competency-based curriculum (CBC) should be rolled out.
Mr Sossion warned that implementation of the 2-6-6-3 education system would flop, just like the ambitious school laptops project unless the whole process was first validated by Parliament as required by law and all stakeholders, including teachers, actively involved in the exercise.
“A nation cannot engage in a huge undertaking such as curriculum reform without legislating the process. Up to now we don’t have a sessional paper to guide the whole process,” said Sossion.
Panelists at the high-level forum included the deputy CEO of the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) Jacqueline Onyango and the director of the Centre for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education in Africa Stephen Njoroge.
Others were chairman of the Kenya Publishers Association Lawrence Njagi, vice-chair of the Kenya Parents Association Sarah Githinji, and Jonathan Wesaya, who is an education development expert.“Parliament and the people of Kenya have not debated and agreed on the way forward on this process. It is absolutely wrong to engage in curriculum design, produce materials and purport to be piloting when there is no policy. The whole process is illegal,” said Sossion.
