How senior school rollout exposed a glaring contradiction that threatens both quality and teacher morale

The rollout of senior school under the Competency-Based Education was expected to redistribute pressure, balance opportunities, and rationalize teaching and learning across institutions. Instead, it has exposed a glaring contradiction that threatens both quality and teacher morale. In top-tier senior schools, teachers are grappling with crushing workloads of up to 30 lessons a week, while their counterparts in low-tier senior schools handle as few as seven lessons. This imbalance is not just an administrative oversight; it is a structural failure that undermines equity, professionalism, and the very spirit of CBE.

Teaching 30 lessons a week in a senior school context is not merely demanding; it is pedagogically unsustainable. Senior school lessons are not light contact hours. They require preparation, differentiation, assessment, feedback, mentorship, and, under CBE, continuous tracking of competencies. When a teacher is overloaded to this extent, the curriculum quietly shifts from learner-centred to survival-centred. Lesson preparation becomes rushed, feedback becomes shallow, innovation disappears, and exhaustion replaces reflection. CBE may exist on paper, but what is practiced in such environments increasingly resembles rote delivery driven by time pressure.

Meanwhile, low-tier senior schools with workloads averaging seven lessons per teacher present the opposite problem. Underutilization breeds stagnation. Teachers who are barely engaged struggle to maintain professional momentum. Skills atrophy. Motivation dips. The institution itself risks being perceived as redundant, reinforcing the dangerous narrative that some schools matter more than others. CBE was meant to dignify all pathways and institutions, yet the current workload disparity silently labels some schools as elite and others as expendable.

This imbalance did not emerge by accident. It is directly linked to the flawed placement process that concentrated learners in top-tier schools while starving lower-tier ones of numbers. Staffing norms, however, were not adjusted with the same urgency. Teachers remained posted, but learners moved en masse. The result is a mismatch between teacher distribution and learner population. Instead of correcting this through rational redeployment or workload harmonization, the system has allowed inequity to harden into routine.

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The human cost of this arrangement is profound. Teachers in congested senior schools face burnout within months. They arrive early, leave late, and carry marking home every evening and weekend. Their professional identity is reduced to lesson-count arithmetic. Creativity, mentorship, and pastoral care—key pillars of CBE—are the first casualties. Over time, resentment sets in, not just toward the system, but toward colleagues perceived to be “having it easy” elsewhere. This fractures the teaching fraternity and erodes collegial trust.

On the other side, teachers with minimal workloads face a different but equally corrosive frustration. They feel sidelined, professionally invisible, and anxious about relevance. In a system increasingly obsessed with output and visibility, low workloads can be interpreted as a sign of dispensability. This fear discourages risk-taking and innovation. Instead of using the lighter load to deepen CBE practices, many retreat into passive routine, waiting for policy direction that never comes.

From a learner’s perspective, the consequences are equally troubling. Overworked teachers cannot offer the individualized attention CBE promises. Learners in top-tier schools become numbers, not profiles. Feedback is delayed. Strengths go unnoticed. Struggles are addressed too late. In low-tier schools, learners may enjoy smaller classes but suffer from reduced subject offerings, limited peer diversity, and the stigma of being in an “underfilled” institution. Equity is lost on both ends.

The workload disparity also raises serious questions about fairness within the teaching profession. Teachers are employed under the same national framework, paid under the same scales, and evaluated under similar expectations. Yet their daily realities differ dramatically. A system that allows one teacher to teach more than four times the lessons of another without structural compensation or relief is neither just nor sustainable. Over time, it risks normalizing exploitation in the name of prestige.

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If CBE is to be taken seriously, workload equity must become a non-negotiable principle. Learner distribution and teacher deployment must be aligned dynamically, not treated as separate bureaucratic exercises. Schools that balloon in numbers must receive proportional staffing reinforcements. Those with low enrolment must be reimagined as centres of specialization, innovation, or pilot programmes rather than left to wither quietly. Workload caps must be enforced, not suggested.

Ultimately, CBE is not only about what learners do; it is about the conditions under which teachers teach. A curriculum built on balance, well-being, and holistic development cannot thrive in an ecosystem defined by extremes. When some teachers are drowning in 30 lessons and others are barely treading water with seven, the system sends a clear message: values are optional, efficiency is selective, and equity is negotiable. Until this contradiction is addressed, CBE risks becoming a progressive idea trapped in a deeply uneven reality.

By Ashford Kimani

Ashford teaches English and Literature in Gatundu North Sub-county and serves as Dean of Studies.