Ministry unveils tough new rules for changing senior schools after KJSEA placements
The Ministry of Education has officially launched a digital process for students who are unhappy with their just announced Grade 10 placements , with thousands of students due to start senior secondary school in January 2026.
Following the release of the 2025 KJSEA results and the subsequent Grade 10 placements for over 1.1million kids, parents and guardians are now able to apply for school changes under pretty strict guidelines to make sure everything stays fair and to avoid overcrowding.
The process is mainly online through the Grade 10 Selection System and there are pretty clear rules in place, mainly that transfers are only approved if there’s space available at the school and if the learner’s performance deserves it.
The Education officials are warning that there are going to be very limited transfers available and these will be prioritised for students who originally chose the school they want to transfer to – this is to avoid “chaos, overloading the school with too many new students and just causing parents even more stress”.
As the Ministry notes in their guidelines, “at no point are schools supposed to be printing out new letters for these replacement transfer cases – it will all be digital and done via email”.
The key documents you’ll need to apply for a transfer include
- the student’s KJSEA assessment number from the 2025 exams\
- the official KJSEA result slip, which has a composite score made up of 20% from the KPSEA, 20% from the school based grades 7 and 8 assessments, and 60% from the grade 9 final assessment\
- a birth certificate to make sure you’ve got the correct details on file\
- a formal transfer request from the headteacher of the junior school that your child used to attend\
- and documentation of the learning pathway you want your child to go down – whether it’s STEM, Social Sciences or Arts and Sports, and which subjects they want to study
Before you can even start the process of transferring your child to a new school, you need to make sure that school has said they have room for new students – this is usually done through the County or Sub-County Director of Education.
Then you need to get your head of junior school to submit a formal request on your behalf at least two weeks before the kids are due to report back on January 12th 2026.
As the Ministry notes “this is a one time deal and there’s no going back once it’s all done” – high-performers and those in line with the school’s capacity will get priority.
When your child’s transfer is approved, you’ll get a virtual joining instruction and the school will only officially record the kid in the system after they’ve turned up in person.
All of this comes as Kenya rolls out the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) in earnest, with the first ever cohort of Grade 10 students moving into special pathways at senior school that are all clustered by subject eg STEM, Social Sciences or Arts and Sports.
Education bigwigs Julius Ogamba and Julius Bitok have been urging everyone to just work together to get this all done smoothly and they say there’s actually plenty of space in the 9540 senior schools around the country.
Want to check where your kid has ended up? Just send their assessment number to 22263 via SMS or check the official portal at placements.education.go.ke.
Also Read: KJSEA placement shocker: 59% qualified but thousands stuck in wrong pathways in CBC placement farce
Ministry unveils tough new rules for changing senior schools after KJSEA placements
