The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) will start the document verification and posting of primary school teachers to junior secondary schools (JSS) in March 2025.
According to TSC, the online application exercise is currently ongoing as the Commission struggles to recruit P1 teachers with the requisite qualifications for deployment.
On 13th January, the application exercise was activated and was scheduled to end on 24th January but TSC extended as a low number of teachers turned up to apply. The commission targets 6,000 PTE teachers for deployment to address the staffing gap in Grades 7, 8, and 9.
Most primary school teachers lack the stringent academic requirements listed by TSC to allow their promotion to JSS. The Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) has urged TSC to drop its hard stance on academic requirements for deploying P1 teachers to JSS for the sake of learners.
The commission was asked to retool the PTE teachers and allow them to teach the Grade 7, 8, and 9 learners.
P1 teachers must have a degree in secondary option with at least C+ in KCSE and at least C+ in two teaching subjects. TSC has been criticized for overlooking P1 teachers who are best suited to teach subjects such as Music, Arts and crafts, and P.E. which JSS teachers are struggling with.
The majority of P1 teachers have quality KCSE grades with Diploma and Degree certificates but do not align with the TSC requirement for deployment. Currently, TSC requires a total of 72,422 teachers to address the teacher shortage in JSS.
The Commission also requires a total of 149,350 teachers to handle Grades 7, 8, and 9. Currently, TSC has employed 76,928 teachers in junior secondary representing 51.5% of the requirement. These are 39,550 junior secondary school teachers who were first recruited on internship terms but have since been confirmed.
In 2023 and 2024, TSC deployed 8,378 P1 teachers to JSS and 9,000 JSS teachers recruited on permanent and pensionable terms. The government also allocated 4.8 billion shillings which the Commission used to recruit 20,000 JSS teachers on internship terms.
TSC has so far retooled a total of 229,292 teachers on Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) and Competency Based Assessment (CBA) since April 2019.
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