Continuous Assessment (CATs) Under CBC: What Parents Should Know

If you've looked at a CBC report card and seen a phrase like "Approaching Expectation" instead of a percentage or a letter grade, you're not alone in wondering exactly what it means — and whether it's good news or bad news. Continuous assessment is one of the more significant, and least explained, changes CBC brought to Kenyan classrooms. Here's what it actually involves, and how to read it as a parent.

What Continuous Assessment Actually Means

Under CBC, assessment happens throughout the term, not just at the end of it. Rather than a learner's understanding of a topic being judged solely by how they perform in a single final exam, teachers assess learners on an ongoing basis as part of everyday learning and classroom activity. This is sometimes shortened to "CATs" in casual conversation, though the underlying idea is simply that assessment is continuous — spread across the learning process — rather than concentrated into one high-stakes sitting. The goal is to build a fuller picture of how a learner is developing a given competency over time, rather than relying on how they happened to perform on one particular day.

The Four-Level Rubric

Instead of scoring performance as a single number or letter, CBC describes a learner's progress using a four-level rubric: Exceeding Expectation, Meeting Expectation, Approaching Expectation, and Below Expectation. Internally, some assessments use a more detailed eight-point version of this same scale, splitting each of the four levels into two (for example, EE1 and EE2 within Exceeding Expectation). What matters for a parent reading a report card is the underlying idea: each level is a description of where a learner currently stands in developing a particular competency, not a verdict on the child as a whole.

Why "Approaching Expectation" Isn't a Failing Grade

This is probably the single most important mindset shift for parents to make. Under an older, exam-percentage model, a low score reads unambiguously as "not doing well." Under CBC's rubric, "Approaching Expectation" describes a learner who is still developing a competency and hasn't yet fully met it — which is a normal, expected stage in learning something new, not a mark of failure. Every learner starts as "approaching" a new skill before they can be said to be meeting or exceeding it. Reading these levels as if they were a pass/fail exam score misses the point of the rubric entirely: it's designed to describe a developmental stage, not to rank a child against a cutoff.

What This Shift Means for How Parents Read a Report Card

Because assessment is continuous and rubric-based, a single report card is best read as a snapshot of ongoing progress rather than a final judgment. A child who shows "Approaching Expectation" in one term and "Meeting Expectation" in the next has demonstrated exactly the kind of growth CBC is designed to track and encourage. This reframes the parent's role too: instead of asking "did my child pass or fail," a more useful question is "what is my child currently able to do, and what's the next step in getting further along on this competency?"

Practical Tips for Parents

A few simple habits can help parents make the most of continuous assessment rather than finding it confusing. Ask the teacher directly what a specific rubric level means for a specific competency — "Approaching Expectation in reading comprehension" can mean something quite concrete about what the child can and can't yet do, and a teacher can usually explain it clearly if asked. Look at levels over successive terms rather than judging any single one in isolation; growth over time is the whole point of continuous assessment, so a trend tells you far more than one snapshot. Avoid comparing a child's rubric level directly to another child's, since the rubric is meant to describe an individual learner's progress on a competency, not to rank children against each other the way an exam score might. And keep the conversation with teachers going throughout the term, not just when a report card comes home, since continuous assessment means the picture of a child's progress is also continuously being built.

The Takeaway

Continuous assessment under CBC asks parents to trade a familiar, simple number for something less immediately legible but arguably more useful: an ongoing description of where a child actually is in developing real competencies, and how that's changing over time. It takes some getting used to, but once the four-level rubric is understood as a description of a developmental stage rather than a score, report cards become a much clearer window into what a child is actually learning to do.