- Kenya has participated in PISA for the first time, with more than 80 per cent of the 6,460 tested learners failing to meet minimum proficiency levels.
- KNEC CEO David Njengere has said the exercise was aimed at benchmarking Kenya’s education system and identifying contextual factors, such as bullying, affecting learner performance.
- The results have revealed particular weaknesses in science and mathematics, with learners struggling to interpret data, identify graph evidence and understand unit-price relationships.
More than 80 per cent of Kenyan students failed to reach the minimum proficiency level in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Kenya’s first participation in the global benchmarking test, exposing significant gaps in numeracy and literacy.
A total of 6,460 learners from 245 Kenyan schools took the test, alongside more than 760,000 learners from 91 countries worldwide. PISA is administered to learners aged 15, who are typically in Grade 9 or 10 at the time of assessment, testing proficiency in science, reading, mathematics and computational problem solving.
The assessment also examines the context in which students learn, including bullying incidents, absenteeism and the provision of learning materials and equipment.
Speaking to one of the local dailies, Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) CEO Dr David Njengere said the country’s participation was aimed at comparing Kenya’s education system with top-performing systems globally.
ALSO READ: 36 Bakisa Senior School Girls in Bungoma County reportedly pregnant; leaders demand action
“Our participation wasn’t about performance, but learning the system and identifying lessons for context. What contextual issues could contribute to performance? We don’t usually consider issues such as bullying and their effect on learning. Until we address these issues, children will not perform well. These are issues that education needs to focus on,” Njengere said.
He added that the government would use the PISA results to improve local systems and strengthen the collection of contextual data, to enable Kenyan learners to compete with their peers internationally.
According to the report, learners performed poorly in science, struggling to interpret simple data or identify evidence in a graph. Poor performance in mathematics suggested that students had difficulty understanding the relationship between units and prices, tasks commonly encountered in daily life.
By Lizzy Aluga
Get more stories from our website: Education News
To write to us or offer feedback, you can reach us at: [email protected]
You can also follow our social media pages on Twitter: Education News KE and Facebook: Education News Newspaper for timely updates.
>> Click here to stay up-to-date with trending regional stories
