No more new schools will be registered until more teachers are hired, Education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed has said. The move, the CS said, will manage the current shortage of teachers across public schools in the country.
Currently, there are about 30,000 public schools, 23,000 of them primary level. All these institutions share 312,060 teachers employed by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC).
This is even as TSC chair Lydia Nzomo acknowledged that there were more than 700,000 trained teachers in the country. Amina said as it stands, institutions need to learn how to share resources. “The government has attached a lot of importance to the teaching profession. That is why 25 per cent of the national budget is allocated to education and a significant portion is directly utilised by the commission,” said Amina. She said the government has always provided funds which has enabled employment of 30,000 teachers over the last five years. “We are now looking into registration of schoolsthat takes into consideration availability of teachers,” Amina said during celebrations to mark 50 years of TSC at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC) yesterday. During the Kenya Primary School Heads Association Conference in February, TSC boss Nancy Macharia said there is a shortage of 40,792 teachers in primary and 63,849 in secondary schools.
