All early childhood education teachers will be required to do refresher courses before they are employed by the government, an Education official has announced.
Ms Jacqueline Onyango, who is a senior director in charge of curriculum and research services at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), said Early Childhood Development and Education (ECDE) teachers must undergo training on the new curriculum at their own expense.
“They can register when we are training teachers over the holidays, but they must pay because they are not in the system,” Ms Onyango said.
ECDE is a devolved function and most of the teachers are certificate holders. Their counterparts in primary schools are receiving the training for free.
Ms Onyango made the announcement Wednesday while speaking at the ongoing Kenya Teachers Colleges Principals Association (KTCPA) conference in Mombasa.
More than 100,000 public primary school teachers have undergone training on the new curriculum so far.
According to the KICD all teachers must be compliant with the competency-based curriculum (CBC) to impact knowledge and skills to learners.
At the same time KICD has decried lack of teachers competent in critical subjects including Music, Foreign languages (German, French, Arabic, Chinese and all the indigenous languages in Kenya),Physical and Technical Education.
The new syllabus requires learners in pre-primary (PP1, PP2, PP3) to be taught their mother tongues, but many teachers cannot teach in their native languages. KICD now wants more universities to teach foreign and indigenous languages to increase the number of tutors so that they can impact the knowledge on learners.
M Onyango said the new curriculum is emphasising on identification of cultures and local languages.
Thogoto Teachers Training Collage principal Margaret Khainga urged teachers to embrace indigenous languages.
“We are not reinventing the wheel, when we went to school we had books like Tusome Ki-Kwetu (TKK), we learnt the mother tongue in all languages so, the books are there the only small challenge is the teachers.
“The millennials are lucky if they can speak their mother tongues,” she said.