At least of 15,000 teachers will retire from the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) by the end of this month.
The Commission says the teachers will leave the service through natural attrition.
Both classroom teachers and school administrators in primary and secondary schools will be hanging their boots on December 31st this year.
TSC is in a rush to replace the teachers through fresh recruitments for classroom teachers and promotions for the administrators.
On recruitment the Commission has advertised 1,000 posts on Permanent and Pensionable terms of service for Primary School Teachers and 4,000 posts for Teacher Interns in Primary Schools.
Others are 21,550 posts for Teacher Interns in Junior Secondary Schools and 9,000 posts on Permanent and Pensionable Terms of Service for Secondary School Teachers to be posted to Junior Secondary Schools.
The application for the vacancies end on 31st December. TSC cancelled an advert for 14,738 promotion vacancies for school administrators after mass protests from various teachers including the administrators in acting capacity.
In the advert 3,392 slots went to secondary school while 11,346 went to primary schools. The vacancies arose from retirements, resignations or deaths. Many teachers have also been holding managerial positions in acting capacity.
When TSC chairperson Jamleck Muturi and head of legal affairs Calvin Anyuor appeared before Parliament said they have made deliberate efforts to ensure deputy headteachers who have been acting as headteachers will be the first to get promoted next year.
They said some deputies had not been promoted because they had not met the requirements of moving to the next positions.
“We are going to ensure that the teachers get first priority. However, it cannot happen automatically because after the job evaluation criteria were done, schools were categorised from national, extra-county and sub-counties and the same were given grades and therefore, these grades must be met,” Anyuor said.
The commission, however, regretted they had for the past decade not been granted additional budgetary allocations for the promotion of teachers except in July 2017 when money was allocated for salary review based on the job evaluation report conducted by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC).