TSC Had Released New Guidelines On Training Junior Secondary School

The Teachers Service Commission, TSC, has released new guidelines on training teachers handling various subjects at Junior Secondary Schools and their qualifications.

According to a memo dated February 15, 2023, and copied to all TSC Regional and County Directors, Quality Assurance and Standards Director Dr. Mugwuku Nthamburi noted that the retooling will involve the Trainers of Trainers (ToTs) and Master Trainers who will offer professional support training.

The training will be held in person using the face-to-face smart cascade model of training from March 13 to 19, 2023 in Teacher Training Colleges (TTCs) and select venues in counties and will be attended by head teachers and teachers of languages, science, and mathematics, humanities, and technical subjects.

The first group of Grade 6 learners under the new Competency Based Curriculum sat for their Kenya Primary School Education Assessment (KPSEA) in November 2022. The learners will transit to Junior Secondary School (JSS) Grade 7 with effect from 1st February 2023.

According to TSC, Head Teachers will be retooled for 3 days face-to-face and teachers will be retooled for 6 days face-to-face while the TOTs will retool teachers for 6 days as the master trainers offer professional support during the retooling of teachers.

The exercise will be non-residential for non-ASAL where teachers will be refunded transport money, and will be residential for ASAL teachers who will be provided with accommodation allowance.

It will also be residential for Special Needs Education (SNE) teachers in both ASAL and non-ASAL regions, ToTs, and regular teachers; and will be provided with accommodation allowance.

Every primary school will identify 3 teachers and the head teacher for retooling as follows; head teachers for both regular and SNE, teachers with Bachelor’s Degree or Diploma in Education with at least C+ (Plus) mean grade or its equivalent, and two teaching subjects, and teachers currently recruited for JSS.

The target teachers will be clustered in the following subject areas; English, Literature, Foreign and Indigenous languages, Kiswahili and Kenya Sign Language, Pure sciences – Integrated Science – Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Health Education; and Mathematics.

Humanities: Social Studies (Citizenship, Geography, History), Religious Studies (CRE, IRE, Hindu, HRE, and PPI), and life skills.

Technical subjects: Pre-Technical and Pre-Career Education, Business Studies, Sports and Physical Education, Home Science, and Art & design. The number of target participants with C+ and above (Regular) from all 47 counties will be 11,192 teachers while those who were recruited by TSC in January 2023 are 30,550 teachers.

The TSC Directors are to invite the ToTs recently retooled for teacher retooling, head teachers for both regular and SNE, the 3 regular teachers for retooling, and teachers from Special schools to the selected integrated school for the training.

They are also required to invite teachers from private schools and inform them to cater for expenses on transport, meals, and accommodation; and also identify and prepare appropriate training venues. Last year TSC trained 60,000 secondary school teachers on CBC to handle the first cohort of 1.2 million JSS learners who joined Grade Seven. The training began on April 2022.

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