- KISE’s lack of institutional autonomy has left learners with special needs and their families struggling to access assessments and specialised support, particularly in rural areas.
- KISE should be granted financial and human-resource autonomy, similar to institutions like KICD, KEMI and KNEC, to strengthen its capacity to support CBE’s age- and stage-based learning pathways.
Kenya’s commitment to inclusive education and the rights of learners with special needs cannot be achieved through policy pronouncements alone. It requires strong institutions, adequate resources, specialised personnel, appropriate equipment, and, most importantly, the institutional independence necessary to respond effectively to the diverse and growing needs of these learners.
The Kenya Institute of Special Education (KISE) occupies a critical position in this space. Its mandate touches on teacher training, assessment, research, professional development, and the provision of expertise in special-needs education. Yet, without sufficient autonomy, KISE’s ability to fully discharge this important national responsibility remains constrained. Without KISE autonomy, meaningful attention to learners with special needs risks becoming a mirage.
For many parents of learners with special needs, particularly those living in rural villages, accessing the required assessment is a major challenge. Some families travel long distances and incur costs they can barely afford simply to have their children assessed and identified for the appropriate educational support. For parents already struggling with the financial and emotional demands of raising a child with special needs, this additional burden can be overwhelming. The situation is further complicated by the limited capacity of Special Needs Education (SNE) officers scattered across the country. In many areas, these officers lack adequate equipment, resources, and specialised capacity to respond to the increasingly diverse needs of learners experiencing disabilities and other learning difficulties. The number of learners requiring specialised educational support is growing, while the systems intended to identify, assess, support, and monitor them have not always grown at the same pace, creating a serious gap between policy and reality.
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A Promise That Has Become a Song Without an End
For years, the promise to make KISE autonomous has been repeated. Yet that promise has remained a song without an end, frequently discussed, but seemingly never brought to completion. The question is no longer whether Kenya needs a stronger institution for special-needs education. The question is how long learners, parents, teachers, and SNE professionals must wait for the institutional reforms necessary to provide effective services. The continued delay in granting KISE meaningful autonomy has consequences: every year of waiting is another year in which parents struggle to access assessments, teachers lack adequate support, and learners with diverse needs fail to receive timely and appropriate interventions.
The introduction of Competency-Based Education (CBE) makes the need for an autonomous KISE even more urgent. CBE recognises that learners are not identical and that education must respond to their abilities, interests, developmental levels, and individual learning needs. The consideration of both age-based and stage-based pathways of learning further underscores the importance of a system capable of identifying where a learner is developmentally and providing the appropriate support. For learners with special needs, this is particularly significant. A stage-based approach requires accurate assessment, specialised expertise, appropriate curriculum interpretation, assistive resources, trained personnel, and continuous monitoring of individual progress, areas where KISE can provide critical national leadership. It is therefore difficult to envision the full realisation of the promise of CBE for learners with special needs without a strong, empowered, and autonomous KISE.
The Institutional Challenge
Another challenge is the institutional relationship between the Ministry of Education (MoE) and the Teachers Service Commission (TSC). In many instances, programmes and initiatives developed by the Ministry to support learners with special needs can face implementation challenges because the officers responsible for delivering these services are employed and managed by TSC. This creates a structural tension that deserves urgent attention. A ministry may develop a programme based on educational priorities, but its successful implementation depends heavily on personnel whose employer has its own administrative structures, policies, and priorities. The issue is not whether TSC is important, it unquestionably is. Rather, Kenya should examine whether the country’s special-needs education system would be more effective if the institution with specialised responsibility for special-needs education had greater autonomy over the professionals and resources required to execute its mandate.
An autonomous KISE, operating with appropriate accountability mechanisms, could provide a more coordinated and specialised response to the myriad challenges facing special-needs education in the country. There is a useful precedent in institutions such as the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), Kenya Education Management Institute (KEMI), and Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC), which have defined institutional mandates that enable them to focus on their respective areas of expertise. KISE deserves similar consideration.
Autonomy should particularly extend to financial and human-resource management. Financial autonomy would enable KISE to plan and implement programmes based on the actual needs of learners with special needs rather than being constrained by competing institutional priorities. Human-resource autonomy would enable KISE to recruit, deploy, develop, and retain specialised professionals who understand the complex and diverse needs of learners with disabilities and learning difficulties. Such autonomy must, of course, come with strong accountability, transparency, performance standards, and government oversight. Autonomy should not mean isolation from the national education system; rather, it should mean giving KISE the institutional capacity to do what it was established to do: provide specialised leadership and expertise in special-needs education.
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Parents and Learners Cannot Wait
Parents in rural communities should not have to struggle endlessly to access basic assessments for their children. A child should not be denied appropriate educational support simply because their family lives far from an assessment centre or cannot afford repeated journeys. SNE officers should have the equipment, training, and resources necessary to identify and respond to learners’ needs. Most importantly, decisions affecting learners with special needs should be driven by specialised expertise, the best interests of the learner, and the right to equitable education.
Kenya cannot claim to have achieved meaningful inclusion while thousands of learners and their families continue to navigate a system that is difficult to access and inadequately equipped to meet their needs. The time has come to end the endless song of promised autonomy and take decisive action. Now that CBE is providing pathways that take into consideration both age-based and stage-based learning, KISE must be autonomous. An empowered KISE can help ensure that the promise of competency-based education becomes a reality not only for learners who progress along the mainstream pathway, but also for those whose educational journeys require specialised support.
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The future of a child with special needs should not depend on where they were born, whether their parents can afford to travel for assessment, or whether institutions can overcome bureaucratic and administrative barriers. If we are serious about inclusion, equity, and the right of every learner to quality education, then we must be serious about empowering the institution entrusted with special-needs education. The time for promises is over. The time for KISE autonomy is now.
By Samson Onyango
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