TSC to Prioritise Acting School Administrators in North Eastern and Hardship Counties Amid Transparency Concerns
The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) is set to give priority to teachers serving in acting leadership roles during its ongoing 2026/2027 promotion exercise, with a specific focus on six hardship counties classified as Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL): Garissa, Mandera, Wajir, Marsabit, Isiolo and Lamu.
The move comes as the Commission works through one of the largest promotion exercises in its history. TSC advertised 34,016 promotion slots and received 126,000 applications from teachers eager to climb the professional ladder.
Of these, only 78,732 teachers were successfully shortlisted and invited to attend interviews, underscoring just how intense competition has become for career advancement within the teaching service.
Why the Priority Policy Matters
For years, education stakeholders have raised concerns about the state of school leadership in Kenya’s north eastern and other ASAL regions. Chronic teacher shortages, combined with the reluctance of many educators to accept postings in hardship and insecurity-prone areas, have left a large number of schools without substantively appointed administrators.
In their place, teachers have stepped in to perform the duties of headteachers, deputy headteachers, deputy principals and even principals — often for years — without receiving the job group upgrade that ordinarily comes with such responsibility.
This is the gap the TSC’s priority policy is meant to close. According to the Commission, teachers currently serving in acting or performing roles — including heads of institution, deputies, senior masters and senior teachers — are to be awarded additional marks during the scoring process, alongside factors such as performance appraisal ratings, years served in grade, academic qualifications and disciplinary record.
For teachers in the six named ASAL counties, acting experience is expected to weigh even more heavily, in recognition of the unique hardships of serving in those regions.
Who qualifies: Teachers serving as Principals, Deputy Principals, Headteachers, Deputy Headteachers and Senior Teachers in an acting capacity within Garissa, Mandera, Wajir, Marsabit, Isiolo and Lamu counties are expected to benefit most directly from this arrangement, provided they meet the baseline requirements set out in the Career Progression Guidelines — chiefly, a minimum of three years’ continuous service in their current grade and a satisfactory performance appraisal rating.
The stated objectives, as articulated by TSC and echoed by education stakeholders, are threefold:
1. Retain teachers in hardship and insecure areas. North Eastern Kenya has long struggled to attract and keep qualified teachers, owing to a combination of climatic hardship, distance from urban centres, and, in some sub-counties, security concerns.
Confirming acting administrators in place is seen as one way to reduce turnover and encourage teachers to stay put rather than seek transfers to less demanding stations.
2. Fill leadership gaps in ASAL schools. Data presented to Parliament this year painted a stark picture of the succession crisis facing schools in these regions. Counties such as Wajir, Mandera, Turkana and West Pokot feature prominently among those with the highest numbers of schools lacking substantive deputy headteachers, deputy principals and principals.
Formalising the status of teachers already doing this work is intended to stabilise school management without waiting for fresh recruitment.
3. Motivate teachers who have served in acting roles. Many teachers who have carried administrative responsibility for years without corresponding pay or title have voiced frustration at being passed over in previous promotion cycles.
Recognising this service through the scoring framework is meant to reward what the Commission has called demonstrated leadership under difficult conditions.
Education stakeholders, including teacher unions and school heads’ associations, have broadly welcomed the decision, arguing that it addresses a long-standing anomaly in which teachers effectively perform two grades’ worth of work while being paid for one.
Part of a Broader Push Against Career Stagnation
The ASAL priority arrangement sits within TSC’s wider effort to clear a substantial promotion backlog. Teacher unions, including the Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet), have pressed the Commission to speed up promotions for teachers who have stagnated in the same job groups for years, with union officials citing figures running into the tens of thousands nationally.
The current exercise, covering 30 cadres from Senior Teacher II up to Chief Principal, is TSC’s most visible response to that pressure. The government’s 2026/27 budget estimates raised TSC’s overall allocation to more than Sh422 billion, with Sh2 billion allocation set aside to facilitate this round of promotions.
For teachers in hardship counties specifically, this is not the first time TSC has attempted to correct historical imbalances through targeted policy.
In previous cycles, the Commission has issued similar directives instructing county and sub-county directors to compile data on teachers acting in administrative roles in ASAL and hard-to-staff areas, with a view to prioritising their confirmation.
The current exercise builds on that precedent, but does so at a much larger scale and against the backdrop of heightened public scrutiny of how TSC conducts its promotion interviews and appointments generally.
The Shadow of the Mandera Controversy
That scrutiny has intensified following TSC’s recent promotions in Mandera County, conducted after interviews held in July for senior positions including Assistant Directors and Sub-County Directors.
Appointment letters for successful candidates were subsequently released, with the Commission allocating positions across sub-counties within Mandera.
The outcome, however, has drawn criticism from sections of the community. Concerns have been raised locally that qualified and shortlisted candidates from certain clans within Mandera were left out of the final appointment list altogether, despite having gone through the interview process.
Local commentary and community forums have framed this as evidence of clan-based bias in how the positions were ultimately distributed, and have called on TSC to explain the criteria used in arriving at its final decisions.
It is worth noting that these specific claims about clan-based exclusion have circulated mainly through community channels and have not, at the time of writing, been independently verified through TSC’s own public statements or corroborated in detail by mainstream reporting.
TSC has also not issued a comprehensive public breakdown addressing the specific concerns raised. What is well documented, however, is a pattern of recurring complaints — including from Members of Parliament earlier this year — that TSC’s promotion and recruitment processes have at times lacked clarity, prompting the Commission to face parliamentary questions and, on at least one occasion, to be given a deadline to produce a report explaining its decisions.
This history matters for how the North Eastern priority policy will be received. Teachers in Garissa, Mandera, Wajir, Marsabit, Isiolo and Lamu who stand to benefit from the acting-role priority arrangement are watching closely to see whether the process that determines who ultimately gets promoted will be applied evenly — not only across counties, but across the sub-groups and communities within them.
In a region where clan and sub-clan identity often shapes perceptions of fairness in public appointments, any hint of uneven treatment in a high-profile exercise like this one risks undermining confidence in an otherwise welcome policy.
The Case for Transparency
TSC has repeatedly stated that its scoring system is merit-based, weighing performance appraisal records, years of service, qualifications and disciplinary history.
For the ASAL priority arrangement to achieve its stated goals — retention, closing leadership gaps, and motivating long-serving acting administrators — teachers in these counties will need to see that the criteria are applied consistently and that outcomes can be explained when questioned.
This means, at minimum, that the Commission should be prepared to publish clear, county-by-county and cadre-by-cadre breakdowns of how acting-role marks were awarded and how final merit lists were compiled, particularly for hardship counties where the stakes of missing out are highest.
It also means engaging promptly and specifically with grievances as they arise, rather than allowing them to fester into broader narratives of exclusion that are difficult to walk back once they take hold in the public conversation.
Every qualified teacher — regardless of which sub-county, clan or community they come from — deserves an equal opportunity to advance on merit. A promotion system that is transparent, consistent and demonstrably fair does more than reward individual teachers; it strengthens public trust in TSC as an institution and reinforces the constitutional principles of equality and equal opportunity that underpin the civil service as a whole.
As the interview process for this round of promotions continues, that standard of transparency will be the real test of whether the Commission’s priority policy for North Eastern’s acting administrators delivers on its promise.
Interviews for the 2026/2027 promotion exercise are being conducted in phases, with primary school teachers and post-primary teachers, including Curriculum Support Officers, going through the process on a staggered schedule set by the Commission.
