Following a Senate decision, TSC may now only hire teachers on an internship basis.
In order to address the shortage, which the TSC estimates to be 11,810 teachers, senators have asked for a relaxation of the employment of teachers on friendly and permanent terms and urged that they instead be employed on contracts.
The Senate National Cohesion Committee instructed the head of the TSC, Dr. Nancy Macharia, to determine the legal concerns that need to be resolved in order to permit the employment of teachers on a contract basis. The committee argued that by doing this, the commission would be able to hire more teachers with its limited budgetary allocation.
Primary school teachers on permanent terms have a starting salary of sh35,000 while those on contract are paid sh15,000. Those deployed to secondary schools on permanent terms start with a salary of sh55,000 while the ones on contract are paid sh20,000. Macharia said that inorder to achieve this, the commission requires an annual budgetary allocation of sh14.8 billion for recruitment of teachers.
The 36,000 newly hired teachers’ records are being worked on, according to Nancy Macharia, who also informed the committee that not all of them have yet been added to the payroll.
The senators demanded a reinstatement to the delocalization strategy, warning that some areas without native teachers would be understaffed if the teachers were let to return to their preferred home counties.
While this was going on, National Treasury Cabinet Secretary Prof. Njuguna Ndu gong declined yesterday’s request to testify before the Senate Standing Committee on Education about how retired teachers’ pensions are paid.
He had already failed to show up before the committee four times.
Prof. Ndungu will now be formally called before the committee to answer a question on a protracted dispute over the payment of instructors who retired between 1998 and 2003.
The committee also expressed worry about the quality of education at junior secondary schools with insufficient staffing levels for both instructors and facilities.
