Junior Secondary Intern Teachers Ready to Strike as Schools Prepare to Reopen
The first batch of Grade 6 students admitted to Junior Secondary School is due to begin on shaky ground, as the intern teachers assigned to them have threatened to strike on Monday, January 8.
Intern teachers and the Teachers Service Commission are at odds. The interns, who were hired on a one-time basis, have now stated that they will not return to class until their terms are changed to permanent and pensionable.
Beginning Monday, the 21,550 intern teachers have vowed to disrupt the school schedule. Their one-time, 11-month contract expired last year, according to a strike warning issued by JSS Interim Secretary General Daniel Murithi.
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Interns must have either a diploma or a college degree to be eligible for work. However, in the primary schools where they are assigned, their employers are mostly seasoned P1 teachers who have been teaching for years.
Short-term contracts are not good for job stability or morale. The teachers say that the strike is a last resort after exhausting all reconciliatory and legal avenues to resolve the job conflict.
Teachers complain about poor working terms and being overburdened by too many subjects.
Subjects in junior secondary school (Grade 7-9) were cut from 14 to nine only this January, based on the recommendations of the Presidential Working Party on Education Reform (PWPER).
In a December 20 circular to regional, county, and subcounty education directors, Basic Education Permanent Secretary Belio Kipsang stated that the decision was made in cooperation with the Ministry of Education.
The number of weekly lessons has been lowered from 40 to 35, including the Pastoral Programme of Instruction (PPI).
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Integrated Science and Health Education have been combined into a single study area called Integrated Science, which has five modules.
Pre-technical Studies, Computer Studies, and Business Studies have been consolidated into Pre-technical Studies with four courses per week, while Physical Education and Sports, Visual Arts, and Music have been integrated into Visual Arts.
The challenges faced by interns has caused animosity, which has shown itself in social media forums where depressed JSS instructors vent their complaints. The vow that the stike shall not to stop at all costs even by TSC’s coercion, intimidation, and threats.
In the New Year, the TSC must move rapidly and explicitly define the deployment strategy. The needed quantity of teachers is in the tens of thousands.
Schools have to operate effectively if the planning heads can clear the chaos and rivalry. CBC must be considered as a serious matter, not as a game of chance.
The strike threats comes despite The Forum for Good Governance and Human Rights’ ongoing legal case. Last month, the Employment and Labour Relations Court (ELRC) granted interim orders binding the intern teachers to their former contracts with the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) until additional rulings on the matter were issued on March 7, 2024.
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The Forum for Good Governance and Human Rights filed the lawsuit to dispute the use of duly trained, certified, qualified, and registered instructors as interns.
The Forum contended that subjecting instructors in this manner violates the Constitution and fails to place students at the proper level of learning.
One of the contract’s problematic elements is that the internship is unpaid but comes with a monthly stipend of Sh20,000.
Another provision indicates that the internship is a one-time, non-renewable program that will last 11 months, beginning February 1, 2023, and ending December 31, 2023.
However, on December 17, President William Ruto told the interns that they would be hired after serving for two years.
Internships, he noted, are part of the on-the-job learning process, but the teachers would be absorbed on pensionable terms following the two-year period.
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However, Murithi stated on January 2 that the alleged two-year internship policy in question “is non-existent and illegal, and such claims from the president should be treated as propaganda and amount to contempt of public trust and abuse of the presidential office.”
He went on to say that TSC was pressuring intern teachers to renew non-renewable contracts “without any TSC circular, which is the official way of TSC communications.”
Junior Secondary Intern Teachers Ready to Strike as Schools Prepare to Reopen
