Leading for Improvement: Reimagining School Leadership in Kenya’s Public Schools

The transition to Competency-Based Education in Kenya—operationalized through the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC)—has intensified operational demands on school heads, revealing a systemic misalignment between legacy postcolonial governance structures and 21st-century pedagogical mandates. Drawing on a qualitative, multilevel case design and thematic analysis, this study explores how a purposive sample of participants (n=8, comprising classroom teachers, school heads, and Ministry officials) perceive and navigate school leadership practices, teacher agency, and collaborative cultures within their specific institutional contexts. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate how frontline Continuous Professional Development (CPD) and team-teaching initiatives are negotiated under rigid administrative constraints. The analysis yielded three interconnected themes: contextual leadership efficacy, agentic CPD, and collaborative teaching and learning. The findings illustrate that while macro-policies mandate relational, context-sensitive leadership, inherited bureaucratic architectures frequently default to rigid, top-down compliance models. This clash creates profound structural friction with localized, communal principles such as Harambee (collective pooling) and Ubuntu (shared humanity). To reconcile this tension, this study proposes a theoretical framework of decolonized hybridity—operationalized through a Communal Transformational Leadership (CTL) model. Crucially, however, the study cautions against uncritically institutionalizing Harambee–Ubuntu within hierarchical school structures. Without structural financial backing, operationalizing these frameworks risks turning communal self-reliance into state cost-shifting—forcing teachers to absorb systemic deficits and converting authentic collaboration into coercive labor extraction.