The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) CEO Dr. Nancy Macharia is quoted in Education News Vol. 274 saying, “All P1 teachers who have higher qualifications have been deployed to Junior Secondary School (JSS)”.
What she is saying is wrong. There are many teachers who were left out for the simple reason that they did not get a C+ in their KCSE examinations. Nobody bothered to find out whether they had an Honors Degree or a distinction at their Diploma level.
What is really important? Should we remain looking fixatedly at where one started or where one has ended? If so, then, what is the meaning of “improvement”?
Many are the times we have extolled learners who scored 200 marks at KCPE and ended up scoring a higher grade at KCSE. Why not do the same for teachers who started with C- at KCSE and ended with an Honors degree?
Those teachers who were “deployed to JSS” have earned automatic promotions with very handsome remunerations and they must be celebrated wherever they are.
But let’s pause for a while. How many are they against the many subjects they are supposed to teach at the jss? Aren’t they simply less than a drop in the ocean? Then what’s happening where they have been deployed to teach?
Dr. Macharia, things are quite different on the ground. It is not only these teachers you have deployed who are teaching in JSS classes. How can they when you have deployed an average of 2 teachers for a Grade 7 class?
This simply means that many other teachers, including those who locked out are being forced to teach the JSS classes by their head teachers. Do you think they are doing a good job?
To make sure that meaningful teaching and learning is going on in JSS, you have to deploy the remaining P1 teachers with higher qualifications that you left out. And for those who don’t have the qualifications but are actually teaching due to the perennial teacher shortage, you have to give them a teaching allowance to boost their morale.
This allowance I am proposing should terminate as soon as JSS is moved to the secondary school section where it rightly belongs as I have previously argued.
If you don’t intervene in this matter things will continue going south, where JSS learners will proceed with some subjects remaining untaught.
By Enock Shirandula
The writer is a retired educationist, a Kabarasi language reviewer of Kabarasi BTL project and author of “SO DIFFERENT SHE WAS”.
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