By Roy Hezron
Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) has announced that Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) Grade 6 textbooks are ready and will be delivered to schools starting January next year.
KICD Senior Deputy Director of Educational Media Services Mr. John Kimotho confirmed that the delivery of books will start in January 2022 and will be completed in Mid-March 2022 before the commencement of Grade 6 in May 2022.
Mr. Kimotho was addressing the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) Nairobi school representatives in a stakeholders’ engagement meeting with KICD on CBC implementation on October 6, 2021 at the KICD headquarters in Nairobi.
‘Over 56 million CBC books which include Curriculum Designs, pupils’ books, teachers’ guides and teachers’ handbooks including Special Needs Education (SNE) have been delivered to schools between January 2019 to January 2021, costing over Sh 5 billion,’ he noted.
Between January to May 2019, about 9 million books each for Grade 1, 2 and 3 were delivered to schools at a cost of Shs 3 billion.
Between October 2019 to January 2020, about 13 million Grade 4 books were delivered at a cost of about Shs 1 billion while Shs 1 billion was used for the delivery of 13 million books to Grade 5 between May to June 2021.
A total of 810,500 Handbooks and Pre-Primary 1-2 Curriculum Designs for SNE costing over Sh. 100 Million (Sh159,893,012) were delivered between December 2017 to July 2018, October 2019 to February 2020 and November 2020 to January 2021.
Kimotho added that the one book one learner ration was achieved in August 2021 after 56,290,620 books were distributed in Schools.
According to the recently released Economic Survey 2021 report, the total enrolment in primary schools stood at 10.2 million up from 10.1 million in 2019.
The enrolment in Grade 1 to Grade 4 under the CBC stood at 5.1 million, accounting for 49.9 per cent of the total primary enrolment. The total enrollment in secondary schools stood at 3,520,400 in 2020.
On January 5, 2018 President Uhuru Kenyatta flagged off books distribution to primary and secondary schools at the Centre for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education in Africa (CEMASTEA) in Karen, Nairobi in a new government initiative to ensure each student has a textbook for each of the core subjects.
Initially, the government used to spend a total of over Sh 20 billion annually on purchasing books for schools.
With a centralized managed procurement initiative by the Ministry of Education (MoE), the government is currently spending Shs 7.5 billion on books and saving about Shs 13.82 billion.
The teachers were given a presentation on Print and Digital Curriculum Support Materials and the development of CBC which was handled by Senior Deputy Director Curriculum Development Mrs. Jacqueline Onyango.
KNUT Secretary General Collins Oyuu, his Deputy Hesbon Otieno, KNUT Nairobi Branch Executive Secretary Macharia Mugwe, TSC Regional and County Director Jane Njagi among other senior education officials were among those who attended the meeting.
KICD has rolled out the stakeholders’ engagement on CBC implementation where it targets to meet all KNUT officials in all the regions, with Nairobi region being the first one to host the event.
