- TSC has been urged to publish teacher promotion slots by county, similar to its existing practice for recruitment vacancies.
- There should be an information gap that leaves teachers uncertain about the number of promotion opportunities and competitors in their county.
- Publishing aggregate, county-level figures before and after interviews would strengthen transparency without compromising individual teachers’ privacy.
The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) should publicly disclose the number of teacher promotion slots allocated to each county if it is serious about strengthening transparency, accountability and confidence in the promotion process, education commentator Mark Otieno Jonyo has argued.
TSC has, on various occasions, made the distribution of teacher recruitment vacancies by county known to the public, allowing applicants to see how many positions are available in particular counties before taking part in the selection process. This raises an important question: if TSC can distribute and publish recruitment slots by county, why can it not do the same for promotions?
Promotion interviews are a critical stage in a teacher’s career, often determining whether a teacher progresses to a higher grade, receives improved remuneration and takes on greater professional responsibility. Yet teachers frequently attend promotion interviews without knowing the actual number of slots available in their county or how many candidates they are competing against, creating an information gap that leaves them uncertain of the scale of opportunity, or scarcity, they face.
The contrast between recruitment and promotion deserves closer scrutiny. When recruiting teachers, TSC indicates the number of vacancies available in different counties, giving applicants clear information about the geographical distribution of opportunities. The same principle, commentators argue, could easily be extended to promotions. The issue is not necessarily whether every county should receive an identical number of promotion slots, since counties differ in staffing levels and institutional needs, but whether teachers can see how opportunities have been distributed and what criteria were used to determine that distribution.
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Publishing county-level promotion figures would make it easier for teachers and other stakeholders to assess the fairness of the process, enabling reasonable questions such as how many promotion slots were allocated per county and grade, how many teachers were eligible or applied, and what criteria informed the allocation. Proponents stress these are accountability questions, not accusations.
For many teachers, promotion reflects years of service, professional development and additional responsibilities. Advocates for greater transparency argue that knowing the number of available slots would not guarantee anyone a promotion, nor eliminate the need for competitive interviews, but it would give teachers relevant information before they compete, which is important for building confidence in any competitive process.
Such transparency need not compromise teachers’ privacy. TSC could publish aggregate figures showing available slots by county and grade while keeping individual applicants’ details confidential, offering clarity without exposing personal data.
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Commentators argue that accountability should begin before interviews take place, not after successful candidates are announced. A clear county-by-county breakdown of available promotion slots, published alongside the relevant job grades and allocation criteria before interviews, followed by a public list of successful candidates by county and grade afterwards, would make the process easier to scrutinise and give teachers a clearer picture of the opportunities available to them.
Since TSC has already demonstrated it can make recruitment slots known by county, proponents argue there is no reason promotion opportunities should be treated differently. Publishing promotion slots per county, they say, would strengthen accountability, improve confidence in the process, and give teachers a clearer basis for understanding how career progression opportunities are distributed across Kenya.
By Mark Otieno Jonyo
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