The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has closed the deployment of P1 teachers who have successfully graduated from University.
“The deployment was concluded and letters for successful candidates communicated through the County Directors. Those without deployment letters should consider themselves unsuccessful. Kindly liaise with your County Directors’ office,” read TSC’s reply following a teacher’s inquiry for more deployment letters.
The Commission advertised 1,000 deployment posts in the year 2019 and 1,000 more in September of 2020.
The 2,000 posts were reserved primarily for practicing P1 teachers having a degree and a C+ in their KCSE examination to teach in high schools.
The teachers were also required to have attained a C+ in the teaching subjects. Applications were done online through a portal that the Teachers Service Commission provided.
The primary teachers who were deployed shall start at job grade C2 at a salary scale of 34,955 every month and will move to job grade C3 when they complete three years as stated in the Career Progression Guidelines for teachers (CPG).
The issue of promoting teachers has a contentious issue that more often ends in court.
The teachers deployed from primary to secondary schools were from both Science and Art subjects combinations.
Primary school teachers have been blaming TSC for many years for failing to promote them after they have acquired higher academic qualifications.
TSC stopped the promotion of teachers based on papers in early 2014 and this made many with those ambitions being in conflict with the decision. Among the complainants were primary school teachers.
Most of those who submitted their academic papers from the Teachers Service Commission only got acknowledgment letters but the promotion they waited for never came to fruition.
The Commission changed the way of promoting teachers after the development of Career Progression Guidelines (CPG) immediately after the signing of the CBA 2017-2021 between TSC and the teachers’ unions.
However, the Teachers Service Commission later changed their way of working and decided to promote primary school teachers who have degrees.
The Commission is reportedly planning to promote all the qualified and deserving P1 teachers to secondary schools to help fill the shortage of teachers that resulted from the 100 percent transition and the double intake that is not far away from now.
In the year 2022, TSC could post 3,000 P1 graduates and this means that teachers who did get promoted to secondary schools could join their colleagues in the coming year.
According to the TSC database, a minimum of 6,347 primary school teachers have a degree with a C+ in the KCSE examination and a C+ in the two teaching subjects hence they qualify to teach in secondary schools.
Following interviews that took place in December 2020 and February 2021, TSC promoted 16,152 teachers following successful interviews.
The interviews are part of the third and final phase of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that was implemented since July 2017.