KPSEA Shake-Up: P1 Teachers Lose Marking Roles After Insha and Composition Are Dropped

As hundreds of teachers settle into marking centres across the country this week for the 2026 Kenya Junior School Education Assessment (KJSEA), another group of educators is watching from the sidelines.

Primary school teachers who once spent part of every November marking Kiswahili Insha and English Composition for the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) have lost that opportunity.

The reason is the move from the 8-4-4 system to the Competency Based Curriculum (CBC). Under the old system, the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) tested creative writing at the end of primary school.

Under the new one, the Kenya Primary School Education Assessment (KPSEA), the final national test before learners move to Grade 7, has no such component.

For years, Insha and Composition were among the most labour-intensive KCPE papers. Every candidate had to write an essay, and each script needed a trained human examiner to read it, judge it against a rubric and award marks.

That created steady demand for primary school teachers, who were recruited, trained and contracted by KNEC to do the work.

For many of them, the exercise was more than a professional duty. It was a predictable seasonal income stream that came after the national examinations ended.

KPSEA has removed that demand. The assessment is made up of five papers: Mathematics, English, Kiswahili, Integrated Science, and Creative Arts and Social Studies.

Two of these are combined papers. Integrated Science merges Science and Technology with Agriculture and Nutrition.

Creative Arts and Social Studies brings together Social Studies, Religious Studies (CRE, IRE or HRE), Creative Arts and Physical Education.

None of them includes an English Composition or a Kiswahili Insha. At primary level, KNEC has restricted itself to multiple choice questions.

Learners shade their answers on the answer scripts, and Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) machines do the marking.

A machine does not need an examiner, a marking centre or a coordination allowance. So the primary school teachers who used to fill those roles have been left out of the exercise.

For the affected teachers, the loss is a practical one. KNEC examiners are paid per script, so the more scripts a person marks, the more they earn.

The council’s payment structure for the 2026 KJSEA illustrates how the system works. Examiners earn Ksh 35 for every script marked, a basic amount of Ksh 1,500, and a coordination fee of Ksh 250 per day. The final amount depends on how many scripts each examiner completes.

An examiner who marks 1,000 scripts earns Ksh 35,000 from scripts alone, and the fixed components lift that to about Ksh 40,000.

Those are the figures at junior school level. But they show why marking has long mattered to teachers, many of whom use the money to cover school fees, rent or small investments.

Primary school teachers who once marked Insha and Composition had access to that kind of income. Now it is largely out of reach, because the papers that required their skills no longer exist at the end of primary school.

There is also a professional cost. Serving as a KNEC examiner is respected in the teaching fraternity. It exposes teachers to national marking standards and gives them a deeper understanding of how learners are assessed.

Losing the Insha and Composition marking roles means primary school teachers lose that exposure as well.

The creative writing papers have not been abolished. They have moved up the ladder.

Under the CBC, KNEC tests creative writing at junior school level through the KJSEA, and again at senior school level in the final assessment, the Kenya Certificate of Basic Education (KCBE). Primary school is the only stage at which the council does not test it nationally.

This is the heart of the complaint from primary school teachers. The curriculum still requires them to teach creative writing.

Learners in the upper primary grades are expected to practise composing stories, letters and descriptive pieces in English, as well as Insha in Kiswahili. Yet when the time comes for the national assessment, none of that work is tested.

Teachers argue that this creates a mismatch. A skill that must be taught throughout primary school carries no weight in the examination that closes the cycle.

In a system where schools, parents and learners naturally focus on what is tested, writing risks being treated as optional.

As a result, there has been a growing push for KNEC to reintroduce creative writing at primary school level.

Teachers say that composition and Insha are not just exam items. They build skills in expression, imagination, grammar and vocabulary, and they prepare learners for the more demanding writing tasks that await them in junior school.

The argument is that a multiple choice paper can test whether a learner recognises correct grammar or understands a passage, but it cannot show whether the learner can organise ideas and write them clearly.

Those who favour restoring creative writing say the omission could leave Grade 7 entrants less prepared for the writing demands of the junior school assessment, where the skill is tested.

There is also a fairness argument. The CBC promises to nurture a wide range of competencies, including communication and creativity.

Critics of the current primary assessment say that a test made up entirely of shaded answers sits uneasily with that promise.

KNEC’s position, as reflected in the current design, is that the OMR format makes marking faster and more consistent for a very large cohort of candidates.

Machine marking reduces the logistical burden of recruiting, training and paying thousands of examiners, and removes the subjectivity that can creep into the marking of essays.

Whether that efficiency justifies leaving writing untested at the end of primary school is the question teachers are now asking.

Any change would have to weigh cost, speed and reliability against the value of testing a skill the curriculum itself demands. The council has not announced any plan to bring creative writing back into KPSEA.

Opportunity Knocks for Junior School Teachers

If the change has cost primary school teachers, it has opened doors for their junior school colleagues. KNEC is this week running the marking of the 2026 KJSEA, which concluded on Friday, October 30.

Teachers reported to their assigned centres on Monday, November 9, and the exercise is expected to last about three weeks, with results due in December.

Because the KJSEA tests learning areas through open-ended questions and papers involving creative writing, it requires a large pool of trained human markers.

These are the same kinds of scripts that once went to primary school examiners at KCPE level. Now they go to teachers in the junior school.

KNEC has named the institutions hosting the marking exercise for each learning area:

For the teachers at these centres, the timing is significant. Many of them attended KNEC’s residential training in August, held from August 16 to 20, and paid a mandatory training fee of Ksh 10,500.

The marking payment is the point at which they recoup that expense and earn from the work they trained for.

As reported in our earlier coverage of the 2026 pay structure, an examiner who marks 1,000 scripts could earn an estimated Ksh 40,000, while one who marks about 300 scripts would roughly cover the training fee through script earnings alone.

For teachers in learning areas with heavy script volumes, the earnings can be considerably higher. The 2025 figures showed Creative Arts and Sports examiners reporting payments of up to Ksh 75,000, though those figures included an advance and are not a promise of what 2026 examiners will receive.

The contrast is hard to miss. Work that once went to primary school teachers now goes to junior school teachers, and the income that came with it has moved up the system as well.

The shift illustrates how the CBC has reshaped not just what learners study but who gets to take part in the national examination economy.

Every change to the structure of an assessment has a human side, and the redistribution of marking roles is one of them.

For primary school teachers, the question is whether the loss is permanent. Some may qualify to mark in other learning areas or at other levels, but the specific roles tied to Insha and Composition have no direct replacement at their level. Others will have to look elsewhere for the income they once earned in November.

For policymakers, the debate goes beyond pay. It is about whether a national assessment should reflect everything a curriculum asks teachers to teach.

Primary school teachers say the answer should be yes, and that creative writing deserves a place at the end of the primary cycle just as it does in junior and senior school.

Until KNEC revisits the design of KPSEA, the arrangement will stand. Primary school teachers will keep teaching composition and Insha because the curriculum demands it, while the machines mark the shaded answers that decide a learner’s result.

Meanwhile, their colleagues in junior school are in the marking centres this week, doing the work that used to be theirs.