The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has now come out clean to explain to the secondary school principals on the criteria they used to select and promote some of them to the lucrative positions of Chief and Senior Principals after huge outcry from those who missed.
In March this year, a total of 36,504 teachers were promoted to higher grades including Chief and Senior Principals.
In a plenary session with school bosses on June 27, 2024 during the 47th Kenya Secondary School Heads Association (KESSHA) in Mombasa, the Commission revealed that there were 3,920 Principals who had applied for promotion against 142 positions of Chief and Senior Principals which had been advertised.
According to TSC acting Director of Staff Antonina Lentoijoni, a total of 422 Principals applied to be promoted to the position of Chief Principal at Grade D5 where the Commission had advertised only 34 positions; with a whopping 3,498 Principals applying to be elevated to the position of Senior Principal at Grade D4 to fill 108 positions.
She stated that all those who applied were invited to attend the interviews with the Commission following a water-tight score guide which priorities various factors and a selection criteria including affirmative action, gender and regional balance.
The Commission considered those Principals, who were acting and were at Grades D2 and D3 during the scoring process.
It also considered stagnation—the duration the Principal has taken in the grade whereby the longer the period the teacher acted, the more the scores.
The KCSE results also played a centre stage during scoring whereby the Commission looked at which mean score could advantage the teacher either the school mean score or the Principal’s subject mean score.
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Where the mean score could not favour the Principal, Lentoijoni stated that the panel shifted the focus to the teacher’s improvement index where they looked at the performance trend for the last three years.
Other factors included performance in co-curricular activities and the age bracket whereby those who had remained with few years to retirement had a higher advantage.
As per Lentoijoni, about 98 per cent of the Principals who had applied for the positions might have been left out due to selection criteria, since the positions were to be shared across the country where applicable.
However, since the Chief Principal positions were very few and couldn’t be shared across all the 47 counties, the Commission opted to give counties which have never received any position of the Chief Principal and also they factored gender and affirmative action.
And for the case of Senior Principal positions, they were shared in all the counties with some getting between 2 and 3 positions.
By Roy Hezron
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