When the curriculum outgrows the classroom: How class size renders competency-based pedagogy unenactable in Kenya’s refugee-camp schools

Abdimalik Ibrahim Farah, Endale Kebede, Francis Kiroro, Patricia Kitsao-Wekulo, Erick Makhapila, Lydia Namatende-Sakwa and Moses Ngware

African Educational Research Journal
Published: October 5 2026
Volume 14, Issue 4
Pages 824-832
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23163675

Abstract

Kenya’s competency-based curriculum (CBC) is a pedagogy before it is a syllabus: it requires teachers to group learners, differentiate tasks, and give individualised, formative feedback. This study advances a single argument — that this pedagogy has a material precondition, a class small enough for a teacher to see and respond to each learner, and that in refugee-camp schools this precondition is not met for most teachers. Drawing on the TeachWell study of 927 teachers in 74 schools across Garissa and Turkana Counties, we treat class size not as a measure of hardship but as a test of curricular feasibility. Refugee-camp classes averaged 89.8 learners against 55.6 in host-community schools; more than half (51.6%) of refugee-camp teachers taught above 80 learners and a quarter (25.7%) above 100, against 13.8% and 3.2% respectively of host-community teachers. Teachers’ own accounts show CBC’s core methods — group work, differentiation, marking for feedback — breaking down at these numbers, with instruction reduced to “those who sit in front”. The threshold is specified analytically rather than estimated empirically: the time budget of a standard lesson sets an upper bound on the individual attention a teacher can distribute, and at the class sizes documented here the per-learner allocation falls far below what differentiation and formative feedback require as the curriculum framework defines them. The evidence is descriptive and cross-sectional; it establishes the scale of the disparity and the mechanisms teachers identify, not a causal effect of class size on measured CBC fidelity. The paper reframes class size as a binding constraint on curriculum reform rather than a welfare concern, and argues that measuring implementation without reference to class size risks misattributing a structural constraint to the teacher. Implications for deployment, staffing norms and CBC monitoring policy are discussed.

Keywords: Class size, teacher workload, competency-based curriculum, refugee education, education quality, teacher deployment, Kenya.

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