Education Committee Asks TSC To ‘Exploit Skills Of Existing Staff’ to Curb Teacher Shortage
The National Assembly Committee on Education urges the Teacher’s Service Commission (TSC) to utilize the skills of the current teachers on its payroll to alleviate the nationwide teacher shortage.
This occurs as Grade Six students who took their first Kenya Primary School Education Assessment (KPSEA) tests under the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) shift to junior secondary schools at the end of this month.
Currently, TSC plans recruiting 35,550 teachers this month to close the teacher-student ratio gap, which amounts to an average of one teacher per school.
In response, the Education Committee states that it has recommended the employer of the teachers to fully utilize the skills of the existing tutors, particularly those with graduate and postgraduate degrees.
“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.
Meli believes that more could be done to utilize the potential of teachers in understaffed primary and secondary schools if the necessary “capacity-building” measures were implemented.
“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.
President William Ruto stated in October, following TSC CEO Nancy Macharia’s disclosure, that the commission lacked 114,581 teachers, and that the recruitment of 35,550 teachers is the first phase of absorbing the intended 116,000 teachers.
Last month, TSC reported that 10,000 of these individuals will be hired on pensionable permanent contracts, while the remaining 25,550 will be interns.
The remaining 1,000 would be sent to elementary schools.
As for the interns, 21,550 positions are designated for junior secondary schools, and the remaining 4,000 will be distributed to primary schools.
Education Committee Asks TSC To ‘Exploit Skills Of Existing Staff’ to Curb Teacher Shortage
