Parent & teacher guide · PISA 2025

PISA 2025 for Kenyan Parents and Teachers: What the Low Scores Mean in Practice

Kenya’s first PISA sitting put us near the bottom in maths, reading and science — and near the top for orderly classrooms. That combination is the real story. Here is what it means on a Tuesday, and five things you can do without inventing a crisis.

Shupavu Education Desk · 12 September 2026

On 8 September the OECD published the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment. Kenya was in the room for the first time. Science was the lead domain. Reading, mathematics and computational problem-solving sat beside it. About 6,460 Kenyan 15-year-olds in 245 schools took the test, inside a global sitting of more than 760,000 learners across 91 countries and economies.

The scoreline, stated without perfume, is this. Kenya’s mean was 335 in science — 88th of 90 published rankings. Mathematics: 326, 87th of 89. Reading: 320, 87th of 89. Level 2 is the OECD’s minimum proficiency line, the point at which a learner can start to use knowledge in everyday situations. Only 9 per cent of Kenyan students reached that line in mathematics, against an OECD average of 65 per cent. In reading it was 11 per cent against 69. In science, 16 per cent against 74 — which is another way of saying 84 per cent of Kenyan 15-year-olds in the sample were below Level 2 in the main domain.

Those are not “our children are stupid” numbers. They are “our system is not yet teaching application at scale” numbers. The difference matters, because the first reading produces shame and tuition panic. The second reading produces a to-do list.

Insight. PISA is a mirror held up to a 15-year-old’s Tuesday, not a trophy cabinet for ministries. It asks: can you read a short text and say what it means? Can you look at a graph and point to the evidence? Can you tell what a price per unit is actually saying? If the answer is mostly no, the problem is practice, not patriotism.

What the numbers are — and what they are not

Hold the sample in your head. 6,460 learners is a serious national window. It is not every Kenyan 15-year-old. PISA samples; it does not census. The learners were typically in Grade 9 or 10, in the age band the study uses worldwide. The test mixed multiple-choice with questions that demanded a written answer. Combinations differed: science then reading for one student, mathematics then science for another. That design is why you cannot coach to a leaked paper. There is no single paper.

What the items actually punished, in the published commentary on Kenya’s sitting, was everyday competence rather than exotic theory. Science: trouble interpreting simple data, trouble picking evidence off a graph. Mathematics: trouble with the relationship between units and prices — the stall, the shop, the “which pack is cheaper” problem. Reading: trouble with simple written texts, not only with literature. If that sounds like Competency-Based Education’s own promise, it should. PISA is, in that sense, a rude external audit of the thing CBE said it came to fix.

Do not add numbers you have not seen. This desk has not been given a county league table, a public-versus-private split with official Kenyan cuts, or a boys-versus-girls scoreboard from a ministry dashboard. If a graphic on your phone offers those extras without an OECD table behind it, treat it as decoration.

The classroom-climate twist that should humble everyone

Here is the sentence that should stop a staff meeting. Despite the weak scores, Kenya ranked ninth out of 82 countries and economies on the disciplinary climate index in school science. Students also reported a lot of teacher support. Seventy-five per cent said their science teacher shows an interest in every student’s learning. Eighty-one per cent said teachers continue teaching until students understand. Eighty-two per cent said teachers provide extra help when needed.

Read that twice. Kenyan 15-year-olds are not, on this evidence, describing chaos. They are describing rooms that try. Teachers who stay. Extra help when asked. A science lesson that is, relatively, orderly. And still the application scores sat on the floor.

The comfortable explanation — “if only children would behave” — does not survive contact with that index. The harder explanation does: an orderly room can still be a room in which learners copy, chorus and complete without ever having to interpret a graph they have not been shown how to read. Silence is not understanding. A completed exercise book is not evidence.

Resources sit under that gap. More than half of the Kenyan students in the study were in schools whose principals said shortages of teaching staff or physical infrastructure hinder instruction. You cannot pray a laboratory into existence. You can, however, stop pretending that a missing teacher and a missing beaker are “attitude problems.”

KNEC’s David Njengere, speaking after the release, framed the sitting the way a serious assessment house should: not as a medal count, but as a way to learn the system and to see contextual issues — bullying among them — that local exams rarely force onto the table. That is the grown-up use of a bad score. The ungrown-up use is a press conference that declares war on teachers, or a parent chat that declares war on CBE, as if a first international mirror were a conspiracy.

Insight. If your school is already quiet, you have the asset PISA says many systems lack. The next question is brutal and useful: what is the quiet being spent on? Copying notes, or making a child explain a table out loud?

What this means on a Tuesday — not in a communiqué

For a parent

It means the useful evening question is no longer “have you finished the notes?” It is “can you show me, without the book, which bar on this sketch is larger, and how you know?” It means a market trip is a maths lesson if you let it be: unit price, change, a receipt that actually gets read. It means a news short on the radio is a reading lesson if a child has to say, in one sentence, what happened. None of that requires a new academy. It requires adults who stop confusing coverage with competence.

It also means you should be suspicious of anyone selling “PISA prep” as a Saturday product. Kenya will not sit PISA again next month. The skills PISA exposed are the skills KJSEA, school-based assessment and ordinary life already needed. Buy those. Do not buy a branded panic.

For a teacher

It means the lesson that only works when you have already told them the answer is the lesson PISA will fail. Put a small, unfamiliar graph on the board twice a week. Ask for the evidence, not the chorus. In mathematics, spend time on rate, ratio and the dishonest pack on the supermarket shelf. In science, ask what would count as a fair test, even if the apparatus is a bottle and a ruler. In reading, use short texts that were not written for the set book — a notice, a health leaflet, a match report — and insist on the main point in the learner’s own words.

It also means the support students already say they feel is a foundation, not a consolation prize. Keep the extra help. Keep the “I will not move on until this is clear.” Then move the clearness onto tasks the child has not rehearsed.

For a head of institution

It means instructional time and teacher supply are PISA issues. A school that loses weeks to unpaid bills, missing science teachers and a compound used as a hall-for-hire is not “implementing CBE.” It is running a weather system and hoping competence grows in the cracks. The principals who told PISA that staff and buildings get in the way were not being disloyal. They were describing the same capitation squeeze the rest of this season is arguing about.

Five things you can do now

1. Practise application, not recitation

Once a day, close the book. Give one graph, one short paragraph, or one unit-price problem. The child writes or says the answer, then checks. If they can only perform with the note in view, they do not yet have the skill. Ten honest minutes beat two highlighted hours.

2. Guard attendance as if it were a learning area

Skill gaps widen on days a learner is out — for fees drama, for chores, for a kitchen that did not cook, for a “quick trip” that ate Thursday. PISA’s weak application scores are partly a time-on-task story. A hardship meal that keeps a child in the room and a parent who refuses to treat Term 3 as optional labour are both academic interventions.

3. Spend the quiet on thinking aloud

You already have more order than many systems. Use it. Cold-call gently. Ask “how do you know?” Ask a second learner to restate the first learner’s reason. Ban the chorus answer in one lesson a day. The disciplinary climate index will not rise because you shout more. The science score will not rise because the room is silent. It will rise when the silence is used for a thought.

4. Name the actual holes: data, evidence, everyday maths

Do not write a new vision statement. Write a fortnightly drill list: read a table; point to evidence on a graph; compare two unit prices; summarise a 150-word text; say what would make an experiment unfair. Those are the published Kenyan weaknesses. They are also CBE weaknesses. Aligning the two is not a betrayal of the curriculum. It is the curriculum finally meeting a mirror.

5. Treat climate — bullying, hunger, missing teachers — as academic

Njengere was right to put bullying and context on the table. A child who is afraid of the walk home, or hungry at eleven, or sitting in a science lesson without a science teacher, is not in the same assessment as the child in the OECD average. Boards that treat those as welfare side-quests will keep getting PISA-shaped results from CBE-shaped timetables. Report bullying. Ask what the school does with the report. Ask how many science and mathematics lessons actually happened this month. That is not activism. It is quality assurance at kitchen-table height.

Insight. The most expensive reaction to PISA is a new slogan. The cheapest is a changed question: “Show me how you know.” Ask it at home. Ask it in the staffroom. Ask it in the lesson that was going to be another copied diagram.

What not to do with a first international score

• Do not rank your child against 335. That is a country mean, not a personal prophecy.
• Do not sack CBE in the group chat. The assessment is asking for the very competencies the reform named. The gap is delivery and resource, not the word “competency.”
• Do not invent a league table of schools. 245 schools sat. Their names are not a public shame list, and they should not become one.
• Do not ignore the support finding. Teachers who already stay after the bell are not the villains of this release. Give them tasks and materials that match the items, not a morale lecture.
• Do not wait for a taskforce before changing a Tuesday. The five steps above do not need a gazette.

How this sits next to KJSEA, KCSE and the rest of Term 3

PISA is not a replacement for Kenya’s own assessments. A Grade 9 household still has KJSEA in late October. A Grade 12 household still has KCSE. Those papers have their own rules, their own invigilation machine, their own WhatsApp weather. What PISA adds is a diagnosis that local papers, because they are also written inside the same teaching culture, can miss: we are better at covering a syllabus than at using it.

If you only change what you do in October, you will get a calmer candidate and the same application gap in 2027. The useful overlap is this. Exam-season calm — sleep, attendance, no leaked-paper theatre — is necessary. Application practice is what makes the calm worth something. A well-slept child who still cannot read a bar graph will be well-slept and stuck.

A note on honesty and national feeling

First sittings are allowed to hurt. Countries that have used PISA well did not do it by declaring the sample un-Kenyan. They did it by picking two or three skills and boring themselves to improvement. Kenya has an unusual starting gift: students who describe support, and classrooms that are, comparatively, orderly. That is not a small thing. It is also not a result. The result we wanted was a 15-year-old who can look at a graph of rainfall, a price on a two-kilogramme bag, and a paragraph about a borehole, and do something intelligent with all three.

We do not have that at scale yet. We do have the diagnosis, the first time, in public, with international furniture around it. The grown-up national feeling is not humiliation. It is a slightly stubborn curiosity: if the room is already quiet, what will we now ask the quiet to produce?

Bottom line

PISA 2025 told Kenyan parents and teachers something they half-knew and had never seen on an OECD scale. Foundational application in science, mathematics and reading is weak. Classroom order and reported teacher support are not. The work, therefore, is not “more discipline.” It is better tasks, protected time, honest resources, and adults who ask for evidence the way the items asked for evidence.

Five moves are enough to start: practise application daily; guard attendance; spend silence on thinking; drill data, graphs and unit prices; treat bullying and missing teachers as academic emergencies. Leave the slogans to people who need them. The 15-year-old in front of you needs a graph and a reason.