What TSC will be doing to Avert Stagnation of Teachers In Job groups henceforth

For a long time the Teachers service commission (TSC) has used a skewed promotion criteria that disadvantages a big cross section of teachers, particularly those teaching in the subcounty and county schools.

TSC has been focusing so much on meanscores, which are influenced by a raft of factors beyond the Teachers. For example apart from the subcounty and county schools receiving students with low marks, after the best have been taken by the extra county and National schools, teachers in these schools have to contend with all nature of problems. Infact most of the time they find themselves playing the rehabilitative roles just to keep the learners in schools .

In a typical subcounty school you find you have students who in the evening change to boda boda operators, bar tenders and so forth. During the interviews, the TSC uses the same criteria to judge performance of a teacher teaching in such a school as the teacher teaching in a well endowed school, with very bright students who joined with very high mark and many of whom come from well empowered supportive backgrounds.

To make the promotion criteria very fair, I suggest TSC adopts a mechanism that takes into account the number of years served in a certain job group. Just the way the numbers of years after graduation counts during fresh TSC recruitment interviews. This will make sure no teacher stagnates in a job group for long. Hypothetically, it can have duration categories like: Up to 3 years – 20 Marks, 3–5 years 30 marks, 6–8 years 45 marks, 9–10 years 60 marks and over ten years 70 marks.

To take care of Performance and productivity, I suggest TSC develops a mechanism that captures value added performance (VAP). Which captures aggregate group entry behavior at form one (average KCPE mean) and their exit behavior state at form four (KCSE). This again should be analysed against the nature of the school. The nature of the school is important because, other school dynamics like parental support, school infrastructure endowment, student stability influence results greatly.

Having considered the marks accruing to a teacher depending on his duration of Service, then other marks can be sourced from say individual teacher professional improvement, Community affairs involvement, value addition depending on the categories of schools and entry behavior of each cohort. Even the performance in co-curricular activities should be analysed against the grade of schools.

For example less endowed schools who have no resources to invest in say training their students for drama, and other activities, or even facilitating their teachers and students to attend these competitions, cannot be expected to outshine the more established institutions. This is why most of these schools rarely make it past the county level competitions.