Curriculum Literacy as Cultural Capital: Parental Education and Support for Competence-Based Education in Public Primary and Junior Schools in Kajiado County, Kenya

Competence-Based Education (CBE) devolves part of the instructional task from the school to the household, and in doing so presupposes a parent able to decode strands, portfolios, rubrics and formative assessment feedback; where that capacity is unevenly distributed, a curriculum designed to widen opportunity may instead distribute it along the lines of existing advantage. This article examines the ways in which parental level of education influences parental support for CBE implementation in public primary and junior schools in Kajiado County, Kenya. Anchored on Systems Theory and drawing subordinately on Bourdieu and Epstein, a convergent mixed-methods design combined a survey, a phenomenological strand and a documentary strand, with achieved samples of 316 teachers (83.2%) and 446 parents and guardians (82.6%) and sub-scale reliabilities of α = .824 to .904. Parental engagement capacity rose across the four education categories, from M = 2.65 (SD = 0.15) among parents with no formal education and M = 2.67 (SD = 0.27) among the primary-educated to M = 3.01 (SD = 0.53) among the secondary-educated and M = 3.54 (SD = 0.43) among the tertiary-educated, F(3, 442) = 111.72, p < .001, η² = .431, every pairwise comparison being significant except no formal education versus primary (mean difference = -0.022, p = .958); teacher-reported parental education support correlated with the implementation composite at r(314) = .846, p < .001. Three themes a curriculum literacy gap, a digital communication divide, and a paradox of aspiration and structural exclusion supplied the mechanisms, while school records documented parent meeting attendance of 17.4% to 34.6% in rural and pastoralist schools against 74.2% to 78.5% in urban schools. The null hypothesis was rejected. Parental education functions not as a demographic characteristic but as a form of educational and cultural capital whose distribution conditions whether the instructional labour CBE devolves to the home can in fact be performed there, and the relationship is stepped rather than linear, with a capacity threshold above primary level.

Competence-Based Education, curriculum literacy, cultural capital

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