Junior Secondary School (JSS) teachers would receive high favour in the January 2023 mass recruitment of 30,000 teachers, according to Nancy Macharia, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Teachers Service Commission (TSC).
Speaking in Mombasa on Friday after overseeing the opening of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination papers, she said that the country was in need of more than 116,000 teachers, with only 68,000 of those needed for secondary schools.
“Some of the new 30,000 teachers will be used in junior secondary schools, some in primary schools, and the remaining will be assigned to 8-4-4 children.” “We are working on these modalities so that we can hire these teachers in January,” she mentioned.
Macharia stated that they have been hiring 5,000 teachers yearly and that the hiring of 30,000 teachers in January will significantly help to ease the teacher shortage.
According to Macharia, the trainings on the new competency-based curriculum (CBC) for JSS were planned to begin in March but were postponed because of the elections in August.
“We recently commenced teacher training because initially JSS was supposed to be housed in a secondary school, but we didn’t finish,” she continued. We will resume the trainings, beginning with Grade 7 teachers, now that the new government has resolved the issue after analyzing the report from the CBC taskforce constituted by the President.
“We will engage with all pertinent education stakeholders in order to provide teachers with additional time to complete training and acquire the necessary tools.” They only need a little exposure to what is expected of them, she said.
QUALIFICATIONS FOR RECRUITMENT BY TSC
1. Graduate Teachers.
Applicants must have:
- A minimum mean-grade of C+ (plus) at KCSE and C+ (plus) in each of the two teaching subjects or, a minimum of two (2) principles and one (1) subsidiary pass at ‘A’ Level.
In addition, they must have:
- A Bachelor of Education Degree with two (2) teaching subjects.
- A Bachelor of Science or Arts Degree plus a Post Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) with two teaching subjects.
- Bachelor of Science with Education and Bachelor of Arts with Education with two teaching subjects.