The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has revealed that a total of 76,928 teachers have been since 2022 to handle junior secondary school (JSS) classes.
Making the revelation TSC CEO Dr. Nancy Macharia said this employment represents 51.5% of the total requirement.
She said the Commission requires a total of 149,350 teachers to handle Grade 7, 8 and 9.
The 76,928 employed constitutes the 39,550 JSS teachers who were first recruited on internship terms but are now confirmed on permanent and pensionable terms.
8,378 P1 teachers who were deployed to junior secondary in the last two years and 9,000 junior secondary school teachers recruited on permanent and pensionable terms.
It also includes the 20,000 JSS intern teachers hired in January this year at a cost of sh 4.8 billion.
The recruitment of the JSS intern teachers prioritized those with science combination after it emerged that many JSS schools lacked science teachers and those with technical subjects.
TSC on Friday 31st January started to retool the JSS intern teachers on Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) and Competency Based Assessment (CBA).
Macharia said TSC has so far retooled a total of 229,292 teachers on CBC and CBA since April 2019.
She said a total of 60,642 JSS teachers have been retooled from May 2023 to November 2024.
However after details showed that the teacher to class ratio is 1:1 in JSS, the Commission plans to deploy more P1 teachers to help in teaching Grade 7, 8 and 9 learners.
TSC plans to deploy more PTE teachers to JSS in February this year to help address this shortage.
The online application for the deployment of the 6,000 P1 teachers to JSS is currently ongoing.
The Commission has been deploying P1 teachers since 2019 as a form of promotion after numerous complaints of stagnation from primary school teachers who upgraded their academic certificates.
In 2019, 2020 and 2021 a total of 1,000 P1 teachers were deployed each year to secondary schools while in 2022 to 2024 around 8,378 teachers were deployed to serve the first cohorts of the CBC in JSS.
Recently officials of the Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut) urged TSC to drop its hard stance on academic requirements for deploying P1 teachers to JSS for the sake of learners.
Instead TSC was asked to retool the PTE teachers and allow them teach the Grade 7, 8 and 9 learners.
In the deployment exercise TSC wants practicing P1 teachers to have degree in secondary option with at least C+ in KCSE and at least C+ in two teaching subjects.
The Commission has been criticized for overlooking P1 teachers who are best suited to teach subjects such as Music, Art and Craft, P.E which JSS teachers are struggling with.
The deployment of the 6,000 primary school teachers will be based on subject combinations popularly known as subject clusters.