Primary school heads of institutions (HOI’s) are attending sub county meetings countrywide to deliberate on term one issues after schools reopened on Monday this week.
However whats emerging from the meetings which started yesterday is that primary headteachers are asked to make use of primary school teachers to teach junior secondary school (JSS) learners to address teacher shortage in Grade 7, 8 and 9.
On 27th December TSC blacklisted a circular whose content restrained primary school teachers from working in JSS without official TSC deployment.
The Commission said the circular is fake and teachers should ignore it. However in the wake of teacher shortage in JSS, TSC has turned to primary school teachers for support.
The primary headteachers who are also acting JSS principals have been asked to allocate JSS lessons to primary school teachers as the Commission plans to deploy some this year.
TSC will start phased deployment of qualified primary school teachers to junior secondary schools.
The Commission will deploy at least 6,000 PTE teachers to JSS this year as it seeks to address a shortage of 72,422 teachers.
TSC will activate the online application portal for primary school teachers to apply for deployment.
On Saturday in a press statement CS Education Julius Migos said “qualified primary school teachers will be deployed to junior schools to progressively ensure that each school is adequately staffed”.
TSC CEO Dr. Nancy Macharia recently revealed that the Commission requires a total of 149,350 teachers to handle Grade 7, 8 and 9.
Macharia said currently TSC has employed 76,928 teachers in junior secondary representing 51.5% of the requirement.
So far a total of 8,378 primary school teachers were deployed to serve in junior secondary in last two years.
The Commission is under pressure to address a looming teacher crisis in JSS as currently the teacher to class ratio is 1:1;
So far only 20,000 teachers have been recruited for the grade 9 class. The teachers have been recruited on a one year internship terms at cost of sh 4.8 billion.
The 20,000 intern teachers will undergo retooling in January. TSC has so far retooled a total of 229,292 teachers on Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) and Competency Based Assessment (CBA) since April 2019.
A total of 60,642 junior secondary school teachers have been retooled from May 2023 to November 2024.
The Commission is under pressure to address a looming teacher crisis in JSS in January as currently the teacher to class ratio is 1:1;
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.
Sources have however revealed that TSC will not allow anything less than a minimum of C+ as KCSE mean grade and minimum of C+ in two teaching subjects for deployment of primary school teachers to JSS.
The Commission is also planning to deploy excess secondary school teachers to JSS this year.
High school teachers registered for deployment after the Commission released a memo guiding the process.
In a memo addressed to Regional, County, Sub County Directors and Principals of secondary schools, TSC CEO Dr. Nancy Macharia had ordered for immediate registration of secondary school teachers employed after the year 2015 to facilitate their deployment to JSS.
All Principals of secondary schools were required to submit names of teachers in their stations employed from 2016 to TSC Sub County Directors offices by Friday 18th October 2024.
Thousands of secondary school teachers will be idling as all secondary schools will not have Form one class from January 2025 as CBC takes over.
The Commission has directed the teachers to be deployed to junior secondary schools near their current working stations.
The deployment will be based on subject combinations popularly known as subject clusters.
CS Migos said at least 14,880 grade 9 classrooms are ready for transition of grade 8 learners in January.
“To ensure seamless transition to Grade 9, the Government initiated the construction of 16,000 classrooms countrywide in four phases. The completion status thus far is at 93%“, he said.