Despite making significant financial investments to get more challenging academic papers, some primary school teachers have endured long-term suffering.
The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has stopped promoting primary and secondary school teachers who update their certifications automatically as of January 2014.
The Jubilee administration ordered all government ministries to stop making promotions based on academic credentials as soon as it came into office. TSC wasn’t left out.
However, the Commission decided to provide teachers a better compensation plan. It did away with Schemes of Service (SoS), which promised teachers who pursued higher education an automatic promotion. TSC substituted Career Progression Guidelines (CPG) for teachers in favor of SoS. Nancy Macharia, the TSC’s CEO, claims that the Commission is more interested in teaching effectiveness than merely producing scholarly papers.
This is why the Commission began focusing more on enhancing and educating teachers about TPAD in the year 2016. (Teacher Performance Appraisal and Development).The employer of the instructor has stated repeatedly that CPG is preferable than SoS and that it has put an end to teachers’ employment stagnation.
However, concerns about the efficacy of CPG have been highlighted by the uproar from Diploma instructors and teachers who have improved their certifications.
Following are some of the primary school instructors that were impacted by the switch from SoS to CPG:
1) Special needs education certificates and degrees
2) Early Childhood Development Education diplomas and degrees
3) Education-related diplomas and degrees (Primary option)
4) Education diploma (Secondary option)
The only correspondence the instructors have had with TSC—despite submitting their academic certifications for promotion—consists of a thank-you card and letters of acknowledgement.
Teachers only utilize their degree credentials when TSC posts job openings for administrative promotions. TSC enabled instructors with a Bachelor’s in Special Needs Education to apply for the offered positions in the September 2021 advertisement for the promotion of teachers to administrative grades.
However, by placing them in secondary schools, the Commission has continued to support teachers who choose to pursue a degree in the secondary option.
The deployed instructors must possess a secondary choice degree as well as a minimum KCSE score of C+ and a minimum C+ in the topics they would be teaching.
This fiscal year (2021–2022), TSC employed a total of 1,000 p1 graduate teachers to instruct high school students.
According to TSC, instructors will contribute in ensuring a seamless transition from elementary to secondary education. In September of last year and again in 2019, TSC advertised 1,000 deployment positions.
PTE certificate holders were invited to apply for 1,000 deployment roles in July of this year.
According to the career progression guidelines for instructors, those who were deployed began at work grade C2 with a wage scale of 34,955 per month and would advance to job grade C3 after three years.
Unknown to many, there is a group of primary school teachers who enrolled in colleges to pursue degree programs in secondary education despite receiving only a C (simple) mean score on their KCSE tests.
As long as a student held a PTE certificate within their time period, institutions in Nairobi, Kenyatta, Pwani, and Mount Kenya enrolled them and gave courses to KCSE students with a mean grade of C (simple).
According to sources within the Commission, there are plans to transfer tens of thousands of primary school teachers to junior secondary schools by 2023.
Primary school teachers with a degree in a secondary field, including those with a mean KCSE score of C (plain), will be among those favored by this approach.
When asked in Parliament to comment on the degree of readiness prior to the 2023 CBC roll out, TSC officials initially presented a proposal to deploy 36,000 P1 teachers to teach in junior secondary.
During a press conference at the Hilton Hotel in Nairobi, TSC CEO Nancy Macharia stated that they will also train high school teachers to manage the junior secondary classrooms in Grades 7, 8, and 9.
She stated that in order to prepare for the introduction of junior secondary, at least 60,000 high school teachers will receive training in March and April of the following year.
Additionally, TSC will train primary school teachers who will work with students in Grade Six in December 2021.
Overtaken by time