According to the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) Chief Executive Officer Dr Nancy Macharia, the Commission will prioritize Junior Secondary School (JSS) teachers in the January 2023’s mass recruitment drive.
The Commission is set to recruit 30,000 teachers next month.
While in Mombasa where she supervised the opening of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination papers, the TSC CEO said that the Commission has a shortage of 116,00 teachers across the country with secondary schools having a shortage of 68,000 teachers in secondary schools.
“We shall use some of the new 30,000 teachers for Junior Secondary and some for primary schools. The rest will go to the 8-4-4 students. We are working on these modalities so that in January we can recruit these teachers,” she said.
Macharia revealed that the Commission has been recruiting 5,000 teachers every year with the recruitment of 30,000 teachers in January set to reduce the shortage of teachers substantially.
“We were expected to start the training of 60,000 teachers on the new Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC) for JSS in March, but due to the August elections, the training was stopped.
Recently, we started training teachers because initially JSS was to be domiciled in secondary school but we did not finish. Now that the new government has settled the issue after they analyzed the report from the CBC task force appointed by the President, we shall resume the training starting with Grade 7 teachers.
We are going to engage with all relevant education stakeholders, to give teachers more time to be trained and be well-equipped. They just need to be inducted a little bit into what is expected of them,” said Macharia.
Grade 6 learners who completed their Kenya Primary School Education Assessment (KPSEA) on Wednesday are going to be domiciled in primary schools.
This means that primary school teachers are now set to teach in the junior secondary school level (JSS) specifically in Grades 7, 8 and 9 starting January 2023.
According to the Presidential Working Party of Education Reforms (PWPER) members revealed that the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) had been directed to teach in junior secondary.
The Commission has set the Diploma as the minimum requirement for teachers who wish to teach at the junior secondary level.
Teachers in primary school level who qualify to teach in Grades 7, 8 and 9 are those with:
- Diploma and Degree in Special Needs Education
- Diploma and Degree in Early Childhood Development Education
- Diploma and Degree in Education (Primary option)
- Diploma in Education (Secondary option)
- Degree in Education (Secondary option) but lacking a C+ in KCSE or a C+ in teaching subjects.
Teachers who have Diplomas selected to teach in the junior secondary will begin at Job Group C1 and later move to C2 automatically after serving for three years.
Teachers who have a Degree will start at Job Group C2 but will later be moved to Job Group C after serving for three years.
The selected will have to be re-equipped on how to handle the subjects taught in junior secondary.
The recently concluded national examinations done by the pioneer Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC) learners will not be used to place grade 6 learners in JSS. Instead, it will be used as an assessment for monitoring learners’ progress and providing feedback to various stakeholders of education.
Besides, it will also provide information on areas that require intervention.
The announcement is a huge relief to the more than 1,287,597 candidates who sat for their KPSEA examination without knowing what their fate would be.
The government is also set to recruit 30,000 more teachers by January with the date for posting the recruited teachers yet to be determined. The reopening of schools for the new academic year will be on the 23rd of January 2023.