The National Assembly Committee on Education wants the Teacher’s Service Commission (TSC) to harness the skills of the current teachers on its payroll to mitigate the shortage being experienced in schools across the country.
This is as Grade Six pupils who sat their first Kenya Primary School Education Assessment (KPSEA) exams under the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) transition to junior secondary schools later this month.
As it stands, TSC is expected to recruit 35, 550 teachers this month to address the teacher-student ratio gap, which is an average of just one teacher per school.
To this, the Education Committee says it has advised the teachers’ employer to fully exploit the skills of the existing tutors, especially those with graduate and post-graduate qualifications.
“What we ask as a committee on education is that there is a very large pool of very educated teachers in the primary schools, and we told them the kind of assessment they are supposed to do currently is to assess how many teachers have graduate skills,” the committee chair Julius Meli told Citizen TV in a Wednesday morning interview.
In Meli’s view, there is still more which could be done to utilise the potential of the teachers in the under-staffed primary and secondary schools if appropriate “capacity-building” is done.
“Some teachers in primary schools have Master’s degrees and these are the teachers we are tasking them with – in addition with the one teacher per school – looking at their competencies and take them through capacity building and have enough teachers,” he said.
“In Grade Seven alone, they have 12 teaching areas and there is no way one teacher can cover all of that so with this pool of existing teachers in the primary and secondary schools, TSC should come up with a plan on how the same teachers’ skills can be harnessed in the same schools,” added the committee chair.
The recruitment of the 35,550 teachers is the first phase of absorbing a planned 116,000 teachers, President William Ruto said in October after TSC CEO Nancy Macharia revealed the commission was short of 114,581 teachers.
Last month, TSC noted that 10,000 of these will be employed on permanent pensionable terms while the other 25,550 will be on internship.
The 10,000 teachers would further be distributed, with 9,000 of them allocated to secondary schools and the rest to primary schools.
As for the interns, 21,550 slots are reserved for junior secondary schools while the remaining 4,000 will be dispatched to primary schools.
