CBC report cards explained: what every Kenyan school must get right

The Competency-Based Curriculum changed more than what learners are taught — it changed how they are assessed and reported. Many schools still try to squeeze CBC into an 8-4-4-style mark sheet, and parents end up confused. Here's what a CBC report card actually needs to show, in plain language.

CBC assessment is about competence, not just marks

Under 8-4-4, a report card was mostly a column of marks and a position in class. CBC asks a different question: what can this learner actually do? Instead of ranking children against each other, it describes how well each learner has mastered specific skills — called competencies.

That means a CBC report card is built around strands and sub-strands (the topics and sub-topics of each learning area) and reports a performance level for each, rather than a single percentage.

The four performance levels

Every competency is rated on four levels. Getting these right — and explaining them to parents — is the heart of a good CBC report:

• Exceeding Expectation (EE) — the learner has gone beyond the expected skill.
• Meeting Expectation (ME) — the learner has achieved the expected skill.
• Approaching Expectation (AE) — the learner is close, and needs a little more support.
• Below Expectation (BE) — the learner needs significant support to reach the skill.

A parent should be able to read a CBC report and know exactly which skills their child has mastered and which need more work — not just a number out of 100.

Formative and summative assessment

CBC blends two kinds of assessment, and both belong on a complete record:

• Formative (continuous) — the day-to-day tasks, observations, projects and oral questions that measure skills as they develop. These are best captured with rubrics, not marks.
• Summative (end of term) — the structured assessments at the end of a term or level, including national ones like KPSEA (Grade 6) and junior-school assessments.

A school that only records end-of-term exams is missing most of the CBC picture. The continuous, competency-level data is what actually helps a teacher and a parent support the child.

What a good CBC report card includes

• The learning areas, with strands and sub-strands assessed that term.
• A clear performance level (EE / ME / AE / BE) for each competency.
• Class-teacher and subject-teacher comments in plain language.
• Attendance for the term.
• Guidance on what the learner should work on next.

Common pitfalls

The biggest one is forcing CBC into an 8-4-4 template — reporting a single mark and a class position, which CBC deliberately moves away from. The second is inconsistency: different teachers recording levels in different ways, so the report doesn't add up. The third is doing it all by hand, which makes it slow and error-prone at exactly the busiest time of term.

How Elimu SMS handles it

Elimu SMS keeps CBC and 8-4-4 separate and correct. It records CBC competencies at the strand and sub-strand level with EE/ME/AE/BE, captures both formative and summative assessment, and generates a professional, parent-friendly report card in the right format for each curriculum — in minutes, not weekends. Schools running mixed curricula get the right report for every class automatically.