By Our Reporter
The planned recruitment of 22,000 teachers and an additional 68,000 Interns in the 2018/2019 Financial Year has been suspended over failure by the National Treasury to allocate Teachers Service Commission (TSC) funds for the exercise.
The Parliamentary Committee on Education and Research has further disclosed that TSC’s budget of Shs314, 586,313 has been whittled down by a whopping Shs78, 646,578 in the 2018/2019 Fiscal Year due to financial challenges faced by the National Treasury.
In a report on Consideration of the 2018/2019 Budget Estimates for the Ministry of Education Science and Technology, and Teachers Service Commission; the Parliamentary Committee notes with concern that the Treasury has sadly failed to allocate TSC funds for teacher recruitment.
The 19-man Committee chaired by the Member of Parliament for Tindiret Julius Melly revealed that on May 23rd, 2018 it held in-depth discussions with the Ministry of Education Science and Technology and Teachers Service Commission officials where serious scrutiny was made on the budget.
The Commission appeared again before the Committee on May 25th, 2018 and submitted that the total proposed allocation to TSC by the National Treasury for the 2018/2019 Financial Year.
The Committee notes with concern that TSC has not been allocated resources to employ teachers in the next Financial Year despite the fact that the initial budget had set various targets for teacher recruitment in 2018/2019 Fiscal Year.
“The resources allocated to TSC are meant to cater for compensation of existing teachers in the service and the normal yearly salary increment. The Committee, however, recommends that resources be allocated to TSC to recruit teachers or the targets be revised to reflect the actual position in terms of teacher recruitment,” states the report.
The report further adds: “No budgetary allocation has been made for the recruitment of teachers to cater for the huge shortage of teachers in cognizant of the implementation of the 100 per cent transition to Form One policy where approximately Sh10 billion was required for recruitment of 22,000 teachers.” The Committee, however, observed that the Ministry of Education should set out targets on the teachers to be recruited in the Government planning documents to guide resource allocation in future.
Presently, TSC is overwhelmed because it has only 312,060 teachers and it is unable to hire an additional 110,000 for lack of funds.
In the past, the National Assembly has been appropriating only Sh2.5 billion annually for recruitment of 5,000 teachers. The Commission needs to hire 68,000 Interns at a cost of Sh16 billion to cater for the Government’s 100 per cent rate of students transition to Secondary school.
The proposed allocation of Sh226 billion to the Commission is largely on recurrent spending where the focus is on teacher resource management.
“The programme which has received priority in the 2018/2019 Budget allocation is Teacher Resource Management which has been allocated Sh219.7 billion as recurrent budget,” states the report.
According to the Committee’s report, TSC has identified six major activities to be financed in the 2018/2019 Budget. These include: Roll out of Teacher Professional Development Modules; sensitization and monitoring of Teacher Performance Appraisal and Development, and Teacher Contracting; Supporting the decentralised functions; establishment of disaster recovery site infrastructure and automation of records; Construction of County offices in Kiambu and Machakos; Completion of Kilifi and Bomet projects; Improvement of learning in Upper primary and Secondary schools through capacity building under the Secondary Education Quality Improvement Project (SEQIP).
States Parliamentary Committee on Education and Research: “The Committee was informed that the following are activities which the Commission is supposed to undertake in 2018/2019 but have not been financed. (i) Recruitment of 22,000 teachers at a budget of Shs10 billion; (ii) Recruitment of 68,000 Interns at a budget of Shs16.2 billion; (iii) Training teachers on Competency Based Curriculum at a cost of Sh800 million; (iv) Procurement of vehicles for counties and Sub-counties at approximately Sh475 million.”
The Departmental Committee on Education and Research further notes that resources have been allocated towards construction and rehabilitation of Teacher Training Colleges despite the fact that these colleges are not attracting any student to study the P1 Certificate course.
The State Department for Early Learning and Basic Education submitted that the next Financial Year is the last period where Public TTCs will be admitting students for P1 Certificate programme since the Government is phasing out the course.
The colleges will thus start offering Diploma programmes.
