Who made it past the cut-off?

Who made the cutoff?

When the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) quietly raised the bar for the P1 upgrade program from KCSE C plain to C+, panic swept through the teaching profession. Thousands of hopefuls who had prepared to transition into junior secondary suddenly found themselves locked out. But who exactly made it past the new cutoff?

I dug into the verification memo released on September 18, 2025, focusing on three dimensions of the shortlisted applicants: where they come from, their age, and their KCSE grades. Together, these numbers sketch a clear picture of the shortlist.

Let’s start with where these teachers came from. One county stood out right away: Kakamega. More than 4,000 teachers from Kakamega made it onto the shortlist, far more than any other county. Bungoma, Nakuru, and Homa Bay followed, each sending in the thousands, while some counties only managed a few hundred names. The map of shortlisted teachers, in other words, was far from balanced — most of the weight fell on just a handful of regions.

Age also plays a big part in this picture. The bulk of the teachers who qualified were in their 30s and 40s. To be precise, more than 24,000 were aged 31–40, while another 12,000 fell between 41 and 50. Younger teachers in their 20s appeared in much smaller numbers, just above 2,000, and the very oldest were barely visible. Only two teachers above 60 years old made it to the list. The pattern here is hard to miss — this was mostly a mid-career group, not fresh graduates or those nearing retirement.

Distribution of shortlisted teachers by age group. Most successful applicants were mid-career, with the bulk in their 30s and 40s.

And then there’s the grades themselves, the heart of the cutoff. Out of nearly 37,000 teachers, the vast majority — 27,268 to be exact — had exactly C+, right at the minimum. Another 9,685 had B-, while just under 2,000 were at a solid B. The higher you climb, the thinner the numbers get: only 63 teachers had B+, five had A-, and just one person in the entire country had an A. The data makes it clear — most who got in were standing right on the line, not far above it.

Distribution of shortlisted teachers by KCSE grade. The vast majority, over 27,000 teachers, qualified with the minimum C+ required.

So what does all of this show us? The new cutoff created a shortlist dominated by mid-career teachers, mostly concentrated in a few counties, and almost all sitting at the very minimum grade required. The headline isn’t hidden in the fine print: when the bar was raised to C+, most who made it barely cleared it, and very few were above.