By Roy Hezron
Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) implementation may face a big challenge if the government fails to pump in enough resources in the next two financial year’s budget to Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to facilitate hiring and training of teachers.
Currently, the commission has only been allocated Sh 281.704 billion in the 2021/22 financial year against Sh 300.503 billion budget proposal presented to the state for funding.
The deficit of Sh 18.799 billion means that the commission will not achieve its target of recruiting 25,000 teachers at a cost of Sh10.75 billion, and 12,000 intern teachers at a cost of Sh 2.4 billion among other issues as it had included in its budget proposals of 2021/22.
According to the Commission’s Budget Policy Statement 2021 and Financial Year 2020/21 Supplementary Estimates presented to the Parliamentary Departmental Committee on Education and Research on February 22, 2021; the allocated amount will only finance the recruitment of 5,000 additional teachers in public secondary schools at a cost of Sh 2.5 billion and 6,000 intern teachers at a cost of 1.2 billion.
“The current grade 4 and standard 6 pupils will transit to junior Secondary and Form 1 respectively in 2023. This will lead to higher enrollment which will call for additional teachers,” noted Dr. Nancy Macharia, the commission’s Secretary in the presentation.
Dr. Macharia added that the teachers should be capacity built to enable them specialize in Senior Secondary Schools.
The intern teachers who will be recruited during the next financial year will include 4, 000 teachers who will be deployed in public secondary schools while the rest 2,000 teachers will be deployed to public primary schools.
The allocation comes when the government is staring at an acute staffing crisis in the public secondary schools, considering that there will be a double intake expected in two years’ time that will necessitate hiring of about 60,000 more teachers since two groups of leaners who are now in different classes in primary schools will join secondary schools at the same time.
The current Grade Four leaners who are the pioneer CBC class of the new curriculum are expected to join Junior Secondary Schools (JSS) in January 2023 at Grade Seven, while the current Standard Six class under the 8-4-4 curriculum which is progressively being phased out will be joining Form One.
Another double intake is expected in 2024 and 2025, when the last lot under the old system, currently in Standard Five joins secondary school.
With the government pushing for 100 per cent transition and with the enrolment numbers raising annually, more teachers who are conversant with the CBC approach will be needed since enrollment rate at secondary schools will increase.
Leaner population in secondary schools is expected to rise by 27 per cent in the first year, from 4,381,701 leaners to 6,029,168 leaners as per the CBC taskforce report released recently.
According to the TSC’s 2019-2023 Strategic Plan, teacher shortage in secondary schools was projected at 61, 671 for secondary schools and 34,941 for primary schools bringing to a total of 96,612 teachers by 2023, a figure which was projected way back in June 30, 2018 as base year even before the decision to domicile JSS in the current secondary schools was made.
In addition, the commission projected a shortage of 97,826 teachers which include 36,155 teachers in primary schools and 61,671 teachers in secondary this year, and a shortage of 97,214 teachers which include 35,543 teachers in primary schools and 61,671 teachers in secondary schools in 2022 using 2018 as the base year.
“At the secondary school level, the constant projected shortage between 2019 and 2023 is premised on the assumption that the government will sustain provision of 12, 626 teachers per year at this level. The full implementation of Competency Based Curriculum is however expected to impact the teacher demand significantly,” reads the TSC Strategic plan in part.
New learning areas such as sports science, performing arts and visual arts will also require new skills, and also training on CBC assessment of leaners with different abilities.
“The implementation of the Pathways and Tracks, while considering equity and cost-effectiveness, raises the issue of adequate preparations in terms of infrastructure and human resources (especially physical infrastructure for Technical, Engineering and Mathematics – STEM – and teachers for new learning areas),” a report by the CBC implementation task force released recently reads.
This therefore implies that TSC is under pressure to plug existing staff shortages, meaning much more money than has been previously budgeted will be required for hiring and training teachers on the CBC approach.
TSC has so far trained about 150,000 primary school teachers on CBC at a cost of Sh1.8 billion since 2019, but is yet to begin training those in secondary school.
The commission is further planning to recruit a total of 1,500 teachers in three phases of financial years starting from the 2021/22 Financial Year (FY) who will be deployed to schools with higher teacher shortage, the commission will be recruiting 500 teachers in each FY .
In addition, the commission is also planning to train 75,000 teachers on School Based Teacher Support System (SBTSS) in three phases of FY which will entail 25,000 in each FY starting from 2021/22 FY .
The staffing crisis is likely to be deepened further by the number of teachers expected to retire by 2023.
By the end of last year, some 16,645 teachers were 58 years old and above meaning they will have retired by then with public primary schools having the highest number at 14,333 teachers while public secondary schools had 2,651 teachers.
The commission requires Sh 16.4 billion to recruit additional teachers each year for the next four years in order to reduce the teacher shortage crisis.
