By Roy Hezron
Teachers Service Commission (TSC) is targeting to retool over 67,000 teachers who will handle the pioneer Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) class currently in Junior Secondary School (JSS) at Grade 7.
The number to be re-trained in March 2023 will include 11,192 teachers who had a mean of C+ (regular) and above in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) and were recently deployed by TSC from primary schools to teach in JSS, a memo from the commission indicates.
Others set to undergo re-orientation are 30,550 teachers who were recruited (regular) in January 2023 and 2,235 teachers in Special Needs Education (SNE) from 745 public primary schools who will be handled by 196 Trainers of Trainers (ToTs) during the exercise.
This is in addition to 22,482 head teachers in regular primary schools as at September 2022 and 745 head teachers in SNE primary schools, according to the memo signed by TSC’s Director Quality Assurance and Standards Reuben Mugwuku Nthamburi.
The internal memo dated February 15, 2023 is addressed to all TSC regional and county directors.
“The purpose of this memo is to kindly request you to invite the TOTs recently retooled for teacher retooling, headteachers for both regular and SNE, three teachers regular, teachers from special schools, units and integrated school and teachers from private schools,” said Nthamburi in the memo.
According to the memo, the teachers will be re-trained in CBC and Competency-Based Assessment (CBA) starting March 13, 2023 until March 19, 2023, which will be a face to face training model in the Teacher Training Colleges (TTCs) and other selected venues.
The retooling will involve the ToTs and Master Trainers who will offer professional support and training; with face to face smart cascade training model involving head teachers and teachers of Languages, Sciences, Mathematics, Humanities and technical subjects.
According to TSC, the smart cascade model will involve a multi-agency approach with head teachers being retooled for three days, teachers being retooled for six days by TOTs, while the Master Trainers will be tasked to offer professional support during the retooling.
Those teachers from non-arid and semi-arid lands (NASALs) will be provided with transport refund and will be non-residential, while those from ASAL areas will be provided with accommodation allowances.
SNE teachers in both ASAL and non-ASAL will board for the entire period of training and they will further be provided with accommodation allowances together with ToTs for both regular and SNE.
Every primary school will identify three teachers and head teacher to undergo the retooling exercise and they will include head teachers for both regular and SNE, teachers with Bachelor’s degree or Diploma in Education with at least C+ (plus) mean grade in KCSE or its equivalent, and two teaching subjects and teachers currently recruited for JSS.
The target teachers will be clustered in various subject areas, which will include English, Literature, Foreign and Indigenous Languages, Kiswahili and Kenya Sign Language (KSL), and Pure and Integrated Sciences; which entail Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Health Education and Mathematics.
Others are Humanities which includes Social Studies (Citizenship, Geography, History), Religious Studies (CRE, IRE, Hindu and PPI) and Life Skills, plus technical subjects that entails Pre-vocational and pre-career, which includes Business Studies, Sports and Physical Education, Home Science, Art and Design.
The Commission trained 60,000 secondary school teachers on CBC and CBA between April 25 and May 13, 2022 to prepare for JSS considering the initial plans of domiciling JSS in secondary schools.
The teachers were trained in specific learning areas in Languages, Pure Sciences, Applied Sciences, Mathematics, Humanities and technical subjects, with the commission training over 200,000 teachers on CBC for the last three years.
Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) recently protested the strict deployment requirements for primary teachers to JSS.
It urged TSC to look at the current qualifications a teacher has instead of grades they scored in KCSE while deploying primary school teachers to teach in JSS.
There were concerns that the over 30,000 teachers who were recently recruited to JSS, which was equated to one teacher per school, may be insufficient given that some schools have more than two streams.
In January, TSC Secretary and CEO Nancy Macharia revealed that already the commission had trained a total of 2,376 master trainers ahead of the retooling exercise.
She added that the commission is targeting to train 90,000 teachers between January and April this year.
