NAIROBI, Kenya, Feb 24 — The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has mounted a bid to anchor the continuous Teacher Professional Development (TPD) scheme halted by the Labour Court in 2019.
In the changes contained in a TSC Amendment Bill 2024 presented in Parliament, the Commission is seeking powers to entrench TPD in its regulatory mandate.
The proposed changes seek to fix loopholes cited by Labour Court when it halted the implementation of the programme.
In 2019, the court observed the TPD programme lacked regulation and hence lacked a valid implementation matrix.
TSC CEO Nancy Macharia revealed plans to have the commission pay for the continuous training initiative saying the Commission had requested for an additional Sh 3.2 billion to finance the rollout of the professional development program.
This will however be subject to MPs approval.
“Increasingly, Wanjiku has been saying the employer should pay for the program. Once we get these funds, we will be sure to pay for teachers,” Macharia said on Friday.
Yearly renewal
Under the impugned arrangement, teachers paid Sh6,000 for each module administered on school holidays.
TSC’s Legal Affairs Director Cavin Anyuor argued that the majority of professionals undergo continuous professional development to ensure adaptability to the 21st-century changes in the education sector.
“We are taking our teachers through some short courses and training them to refresh their minds in 21st-century skills. This is continuous professional development, which you take every year, and then you get your practicing certificate,” Anyour stated.
TSC’s amendments propose to prohibit teachers who fail to undertake prescribed continuous professional development programmes from teaching at both public and private institutions.
“We are trying to make this provision attractive and appropriate and we want to professionalize so that it looks like any other profession in the world,” Anyuor stated.
The amendments further propose the yearly renewal of professional certificates down from an initial proposal of every five years.
The bone of contention will be who will be responsible for the training. In the halted program TSC contracted four institutions on an annual agreement.
The four include; Kenyatta University, Mount Kenya University, Riara, and Kenya Education Management Institute.
However, the Presidential Working Party recommended for establishment of the Kenya School of Teacher and Education Management (KeSTEM) to coordinate professional training of teachers.
Entry level requirement
TSC’s proposed changes are also anticipated to open a turf war with teachers’ unions and various stakeholders with the move to review entry requirements for teacher training institutes.
The Commission argied the minimum requirements to train as a teacher should be raised under the new education curriculum.
Currently, students who scored D in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exams can join the profession.
“They say the quality of education is commensurate to the quality of teachers,” remarked Macharia.
The revised qualification framework is aimed at uplifting the esteem of profession by enhancing the teaching qualification for the foreign job market.
“Teaching is the mother of all professions, you want the quality of the teacher to be low but you want to produce an engineer or a pilot who will not take us to the sea,” Anyuor argued.