TSC asked the over 300,000 unemployed teachers to go through the ongoing Diploma upgrading programme in order to be CBC compliant.
Speaking recently TSC Director for Quality Assurance and Standards, Dr. Reuben Nthamburi, said though employment for those who will upgrade to Diploma Primary Teacher Education (DPTE) will not be automatic there chances will be enhanced.
Dr. Nthamburi who was representing the Commission’s Chief Executive Officer Dr. Nancy Macharia, was addressing the Senators of the Senate Committee on Education chaired by Dr. Alice Milgo and Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) on CBC sensitisation in Naivasha recently, said the unemployed teachers who will graduate after nine months of training will be at par with those who will graduate with DPTE, and so help the Commission to effectively deal with their salaries and motivation.
“As a Commission as indicated, when we post a teacher now who is not CBC compliant, we have a lot of cases that are coming up because the teacher is not able to teach Grade 1 to 5 because is not CBC compliant. So what has been decided is that these teachers who are out there they need to go through this training,” said Dr. Nthamburi.
CALENDAR FOR DIPLOMA UPGRADING STUDENTS
| Term | Opening | Closing | Duration |
| Term 1 | 4th October 2021 | 23rd December 2021 | 12 weeks |
| Holiday | 23rd December 2021 | 3rd January 2022 | 1 week |
| Term 2 | 3rd January 2022 | 8th April 2022 | 14 weeks |
| Holiday | 8th April 2022 | 29th April 2022 | 3 weeks |
| Term 3 | 3rd May 2022 | 5th August 2022 | 14 weeks |
| Holiday | 6th August 2022 | 25th September 2022 | 7 weeks |
| Term 4 | 26th September 2022 | 25th November 2022 | 9 weeks |
The upgrading programme shall take 4 terms for DPTE (Diploma Primary Teacher Education) and 5 terms for DECTE (Diploma Early Childhood Teacher Education). Both will have course work and a full term for practicum.
Graduates for the Upgrading Programmes shall be expected to teach all the subjects offered in the area of training.
The total number of the content and pedagogical hours in the Upgrading Programmes will be 786 hours for DPTE and 1176 hours for DECTE.
For ECDE upgrading, they will do all the learning areas in DECTE with more hours than in PTE upgrading but will both have a teaching practicum of 300 hours.
However P1 teachers will only study the subjects which they didn’t do in college.
“The CBTEC expects a primary school teacher to be grounded in all the subjects offered in primary schools, therefore upgrading PTE teacher trainee will be exempted from the subjects they had specialised in and take only those they did not take in the certificate course,” reads a taskforce report.
Dr. Nthamburi clarified that the upgrade programme is completely different with the recently rolled out Teacher Professional Development (TPD).
