Ministry of Education Extends Grade 10 Selection Exercise as KEMIS Portal Remains Accessible to Schools and Parents
The Ministry of Education has extended the Grade 10 Selection and Placement exercise that had been scheduled to close on 11th September 2026, giving schools, parents and guardians additional time to complete the process for the roughly 1.2 million Grade 9 learners set to transition into Senior School in 2027.
The extension comes after weeks of disruption caused by repeated crashes on the Kenya Education Management Information System (KEMIS), the digital backbone through which the entire selection and placement exercise is run.
Officials confirmed that the KEMIS Selection and Placement portal remains fully operational, and that schools, education stakeholders and parents can continue to log in, verify learner records, and complete outstanding submissions.
The decision to extend the timeline follows sustained pressure from school administrators and education stakeholders across the country, many of whom had been pushing the Ministry to push back the deadline after the system’s servers buckled under the weight of nationwide traffic, stalling the exercise for several days at a stretch.
A Difficult Three Weeks
The Grade 10 Selection and Placement exercise opened on 24th August 2026, the same day schools reopened for the third term of the academic calendar.
It was designed as a three-week window through which the country’s first cohort of learners transitioning under the Competency-Based Education (CBE) framework would select their preferred Senior School pathway, subject combination, and choice of institutions. The exercise was originally due to close on 11th September 2026.
From the outset, however, the rollout proved far from smooth. As more schools attempted to log into the portal in the days following its launch, complaints mounted over slow response times, failed submissions and outright system crashes.
Some administrators reported that data they had painstakingly entered appeared to vanish after the page refreshed, forcing them to start the process over. In other instances, schools found that the platform was displaying records tied to the previous cohort of learners rather than the current Grade 9 candidates, adding a layer of confusion to an already strained process.
The scale of the disruption eventually forced the exercise to stall altogether for a number of days, leaving school administrators, parents and learners in limbo as the clock continued to tick down toward the original deadline.
With nearly 1.2 million learners depending on the system to secure their placement into Senior School, even a short pause translated into significant lost time nationwide.
The Ministry Responds: A Five-Day Working Window
Facing mounting complaints from principals, ICT teachers and parents, the Ministry moved to stabilise the system. In a decisive step, the KEMIS Selection and Placement portal was revamped and relaunched at midnight on Sunday, 6th September 2026.
This paved the way for what officials described as a compressed five-day working window, running from Monday, 7th September through to the original closing date of Friday, 11th September.
For many schools, however, five working days proved insufficient to clear the backlog that had built up during the earlier stoppage.
A significant number of institutions reported that they were still not through with the selection process by the time the window was set to close, citing the sheer volume of learner records that needed to be processed in such a short period.
It was this shortfall — schools racing against time with thousands of learners still unplaced — that ultimately prompted the latest extension.
By extending the exercise, the Ministry has effectively acknowledged that the technical setbacks experienced earlier in the process could not be fully absorbed within the revised five-day timeline, and that a rigid adherence to the original closing date risked leaving genuine cases unresolved through no fault of the schools or families involved.
Portal Remains Accessible
Despite the turbulence of the past few weeks, the Ministry has been keen to stress that the KEMIS Selection and Placement portal is currently stable and accessible.
Schools, stakeholders and parents are able to log in, search for information, and complete the necessary steps without the interruptions that characterised the earlier phase of the exercise. The portal can be accessed at selection-placement.kemis.go.ke.
For school administrators who continue to experience difficulties logging in, the Ministry has issued a clear procedure to follow:
- Enter the school’s KNEC Code, omitting the initial “0” at the beginning of the code.
- Enter the designated password issued to the school.
- Click “Log In” to access the portal.
For example, a school with the KNEC Code “04656565” would enter “4656565” (dropping the leading zero) along with its password before proceeding to log in. Once inside, administrators should be able to view the full list of learners placed in or associated with their institution.
Directives Issued Alongside the Portal Overhaul
When the Ministry revamped the KEMIS selection portal at midnight on Sunday, 6th September 2026, it did not merely restore access — it also rolled out a comprehensive set of operational guidelines aimed at tightening how the exercise is administered by education officials and Heads of Institutions (HOIs) going forward.
Secure credential distribution. Login credentials for the selection and placement portal are channelled directly to Sub-County Directors of Education (SCDEs), who are then responsible for distributing them to individual schools. Given the sensitivity of learner data involved, schools have been directed to handle these credentials with strict confidentiality, in line with data protection regulations.
Public search access preserved. While the school-facing side of the portal requires secure credentials for final submissions, a separate public search portal remains open to parents, guardians and other stakeholders. This allows families to independently search for, verify, and filter the Senior Schools and subject combinations available, without needing administrator-level access.
Data rectification and gender updates. Junior schools that identify data discrepancies in learner records — including incorrect gender mappings — have been empowered to correct these in real time, working in close coordination with the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC), which maintains the underlying assessment data.
Handling duplicate assessment numbers. In cases where candidates are found to have two assessment numbers as a result of historical overlaps in the examinations database, schools have been instructed to verify which of the two numbers is active and legitimate, ensuring that only that number is used in final placement processing. This is intended to prevent duplicate or conflicting entries from disrupting the placement outcome.
Profile verification and archiving. Heads of Institutions have been directed to print each learner’s selection profile immediately after it is submitted on the portal. These printed profiles must carry the physical signature of a parent or guardian confirming the choices made, and are to be securely archived within school files for future audit and verification purposes.
Tracking absentee and exceptional cases. Schools have also been told to actively follow up on any learners who were absent during the selection window, to ensure that no eligible candidate is left out of the placement process purely because they were not physically present when their school was completing submissions. In the more tragic instance of a learner’s death, Heads of Institutions are required to formally notify their respective Sub-County Director of Education in writing, so that such cases can be properly recorded and closed out within the system.
Zero tolerance on unauthorised charges. Perhaps the firmest of the directives was the Ministry’s reiteration that the entire selection and placement exercise is completely free of charge. Schools and administrators have been explicitly barred from levying any administrative fees, computer charges, or other operational costs on parents in connection with the exercise — a warning issued against the backdrop of long-standing concerns that some institutions have, in the past, sought to charge parents informally for processes that are meant to be cost-free.
Guidance for Schools Struggling with Pathway Selection
Beyond the policy directives, the Ministry — through the KEMIS portal interface itself — has also laid out a simplified, step-by-step procedure to help junior schools that have found the pathway and subject-combination selection process confusing.
Once logged into the Grade 9 Senior School selection section of the KEMIS portal, a school will typically see its name displayed alongside a breakdown of learners by gender — for instance, a notation showing 11 boys and 11 girls — together with a completion count that may read “0 completed.”
According to the guidance, this does not mean the system has lost the school’s Grade 9 records; rather, it simply indicates that the school has not yet opened and processed the individual learner files.
To proceed, school administrators are advised to:
- Tap on the box marked “UNC…” (an abbreviation for uncompleted entries) or the box marked “TOTA…” (total learners), which opens the full list of names associated with the school.
- Select the first learner’s name from the list that appears.
- Work through three sequential steps for that learner:
- Step 1 — Pathway: Choose one of the three available pathways — STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), Social Sciences, or Arts and Sports Science.
- Step 2 — Subject combination: Select the three subjects that make up the chosen pathway’s combination.
- Step 3 — Schools: Choose a total of eight Senior Schools, broken down as three National schools, two Extra-County schools, two County schools, and one Sub-County day school.
Once all three steps have been completed for a learner, administrators are instructed to click the “SAVE” button, which moves that learner’s status from “Incomplete” to “Complete.” The overall progress bar at the bottom of the screen updates accordingly — moving, for example, from “0 of 22 (0%)” to “1 of 22,” then “2 of 22,” and so on as each learner’s selection is finalised.
Administrators have been strongly cautioned against using their phone or browser’s back button while working through the system, as doing so risks losing unsaved data. Instead, all progression through the portal should be done using the in-built “SAVE” function.
In summary, the recommended workflow for junior schools is as follows: log in as the junior school, navigate to the pathway selection section, start the selection process, choose a learner and follow the prescribed steps, enter the required parent or guardian details — including name, ID number and phone number — and submit them.
From there, the school selects the learner’s pathway, proceeds to choose the subject combination (either by using the built-in search tool or by entering the combination code directly, if already known), and finally confirms and submits the completed profile.
What the Extension Means Going Forward
For the roughly 1.2 million Grade 9 learners caught up in this year’s exercise, the extension offers a measure of relief after a selection period marked by uncertainty and technical frustration.
Schools that had been racing to complete submissions within the compressed five-day window will now have additional time to work through outstanding learner files, correct data discrepancies, and ensure that every eligible candidate — including those who were previously absent — is properly captured in the system before placement is finalised.
At the same time, the extension underscores the scale of the technical challenge the Ministry faces in administering a fully digitised, nationwide placement exercise of this size for the first time under the CBE framework.
With the portal now stabilised and a clearer set of operational guidelines in place, attention will likely turn to how smoothly the remaining stages of the process — placement confirmation, replacement requests for schools with vacancies, and eventual reporting at Senior School — unfold in the weeks ahead.
Schools and parents have been urged to continue monitoring official communication from the Ministry of Education, KEMIS and KNEC for any further updates on timelines or procedural changes as the exercise moves toward completion.
