Mazera Ndurya
2 July 2009
Nairobi — The country requires more than 60, 000 new teachers to be able to meet the increasing demand for quality education, the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has said.
Of these 22, 000 are required in post primary while 45, 000 are needed in primary schools and the TSC says they will be filled when the government increases the budgetary allocation.
Defending the recruitment of about 10, 000 teachers which the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) has dismissed as casual employees, the chairman of the TSC Ibrahim Hussein said their terms of service will be improved when opportunities for employment are found.
Speaking in Mombasa during the annual Kenya Secondary Schools Heads Association conference Mr Hussein said given the budgetary constraints that was the best for the country.
"We do not want people to politicize this exercise because this is a temporary measure because when opportunities arise these will be the first people to be considered for permanent and pensionable terms," he said.
Mr Hussein assured teachers that the implementation of the new terms of service for teachers which include harmonization of salaries to that of other civil servants will be reviewed once the economy of the country improves.
The new scheme will be implemented in three phases but the TSC chairman said it could be reduced to two phases if the state of the economy improves.
On requests from the head teachers to be given responsibility allowances, Mr Hussein said they will soon start working on the modalities that will also include hard ship allowances.
"As TSC we are convinced that it's justified because of the responsibilities that head teachers have and we are optimistic that that this will be done," he said adding that the hardship allowances were being reviewed alongside other government departments.
A senior official of the TSC who represented the TSC Secretary Gabriel Lengoiboin, Mr Simon Kavisi said major reforms have been put in place to streamline the operations of the commission.
He said the TSC was soon going full scale on information technology (ict) to address the backlog on promotion of teachers.
"Most of the records are manually kept and this makes it very difficult to fast-track the information. This mainly affects the teachers on job groups L to N. But things will soon be streamlines especially once we move to our newly built offices for the TSC,' Mr Kavisi said.
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