In December 2025 the Ministry of Education released the first Kenya Junior School Education Assessment (KJSEA) results, ending the long‑standing practice of reporting a single mean score for each school.

Under KJSEA learners are placed in four performance levels – Exceeding, Meeting, Approaching and Below Expectation – each split into two sub‑levels, creating an eight‑point scale that is applied separately to each subject.

The Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) explains that the design ensures a child’s strength in one subject is not hidden by weakness in another, a shift from the old KCPE system that produced a total out of 500.

KNEC chief executive Dr David Njengere has stressed that KJSEA does not generate an aggregate score, and schools publishing such figures are providing fabricated data.

Within days of the results release, several schools in different counties issued documents showing mean scores and league‑style rankings, prompting KNEC to label those analyses as misleading.

Parents have expressed confusion over the new grading system, turning to social media for clarification, while official results are accessible only through the KNEC portal or via SMS.

The pioneer cohort of KJSEA learners is now in Grade 10; their final Kenya Certificate of Basic Education scores will combine school‑based assessments with a national exam in Grade 12.

KNEC maintains that any school still publishing a mean score is inventing a metric that no longer exists under the new assessment framework.