Kenya’s most popular senior schools could soon face limits on the number of students they admit under a proposal before Parliament aimed at reducing overcrowding and spreading learners more evenly across schools.
The proposal by Kitutu Masaba MP Clive Gisairo seeks to limit Category One (C1) schools to 10 streams, Category Two (C2) schools to eight, Category Three (C3) schools to five and Category Four (C4) schools to three.
Each stream would have a maximum of 40 students.
If adopted, a C1 school would therefore admit a maximum of 400 students in each intake.
The proposal comes amid growing concerns that many parents prefer C1 and C2 schools, leaving some C3 and C4 institutions with very few students and limited funding.
Parliament’s motion notes that some C1 and C2 schools admitted Grade 10 students at more than twice their approved capacity during the first senior school intake in January 2026. At the same time, some C3 and C4 schools remained under-enrolled.
Gisairo said the current funding system, where government money largely follows the number of students in a school, may be encouraging institutions to admit more learners than their facilities can comfortably support.
“Money follows the child; some schools have turned to exam cheating to attract more students and get more money,” Gisairo said.
He also argued that the high demand for a few schools was putting pressure on teachers and reducing the amount of time they can spend with individual learners.
The MP wants the government to review the capitation formula so that schools receive funding based not only on student numbers but also on their actual infrastructure and capacity.
The proposal also calls for more investment in C3 and C4 schools, including classrooms, laboratories, ICT facilities, sanitation and other essential facilities.
The aim is to improve the quality of these schools and give parents more confidence in enrolling their children there.
Nominated MP Dorothy Kiara said parents were also contributing to the problem by preferring schools with well-known names.
“We all want to take our children to schools with a title. It’s us the elite who want our children to go to Lenana, Nairobi School and others,” Kiara said.
She said this pressure forces some schools to take in more students than they can accommodate.
Suba South North MP Millie Odhiambo also raised concerns about the imbalance, saying some schools in her constituency have very few students because families prefer C1 and C2 institutions.
“One of the schools in my constituency has seven students because everyone is running to C1 and C3 schools,” Odhiambo said.
She warned that overcrowding was also putting pressure on teachers.
“It is not possible to inculcate values to over 500 students in a class; it’s like a political rally, yet it’s supposed to be a school,” she said.
The four categories broadly represent the former national, extra-county, county and sub-county schools.
Kenya currently has 204 public C1 schools, 692 C2 schools, 1,373 C3 schools and 7,234 C4 schools, according to Ministry of Education data.
The debate comes as Kenya continues to implement the Competency-Based Education system, with concerns growing over differences in resources, enrolment and performance between school categories.
A 2026 senior school survey by Usawa Agenda found that C1 schools had an average of 60 learners per stream in Form Two, compared with 43 in C4 schools. The figures were 56 against 40 in Form Three and 55 against 40 in Form Four.
The survey also found that C1 schools had better access to facilities. About 89.8 per cent had operational computer laboratories, compared with 18.6 per cent of C4 schools, while 79.3 per cent of C1 schools had libraries compared with 29.1 per cent of C4 schools.
C1 learners were also more than eight times as likely to attain C+ and above in KCSE compared with learners in C4 schools, although the survey cautioned that school category alone does not explain the difference.
If approved, the proposed changes would affect the placement of Grade 10 learners from January 2027.
The move would shift the focus towards matching student numbers with the actual capacity of schools while giving C3 and C4 institutions a greater chance to attract learners and reducing pressure on the country’s most sought-after senior schools.
