116,000 Teacher Shortage To End In Two Years – Machogu.
The government has pledged to end the deficit of 116,000 teachers in public schools within two fiscal years.
Education CS Ezekiel Machogu stated that the government will employ 58,000 teachers annually to alleviate the shortage.
The teachers will be selected from the over 300,000 trained but unemployed persons in the nation.
In the first phase of completing the promise to alleviate the teacher deficit in public schools, the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has begun hiring 30,000 teachers by January 2023, per the instruction of the President.
Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut) and Kenya Union of Post-Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet) applauded the initiative, but deemed it insignificant.
Collins Oyuu, secretary general of Knut, and Akelo Misori, secretary general of Kuppet, stated that despite the recruitment of 30,000 teachers, the country still faces a significant teacher shortage.
Machogu stated that the government is committed to collaborating with teachers to improve teaching and learning results that would produce the best people for the country in the future.
The government of Kenya Kwanza has a planned education charter that places the teacher at the center of the master plan, he noted.
“The education charter seeks the establishment of a national education fund to mobilise grants, bursaries and scholarships from private and public sponsors to cater for non-tuition costs,” Machogu said.
During Wednesday’s 62nd annual delegates’ conference at Citam in Kisumu, the regional director of education for Nyanza, Nelson Sifuna, read the CS’s remarks in his place.
Currently, parents pay for transportation, meals, uniforms, and boarding expenses under the Free Primary Education and Free Day Secondary Education programs.
Machogu reaffirmed that the administration of President William Ruto will seek to strengthen day secondary schools in order to provide access to quality education and minimize education costs.
Education currently occupies 25.9% of the national budget. The sector was allocated Sh544.4 billion for the 2022-23 fiscal year, the largest amount of any ministry’s Sh3.31 trillion budget.
Machogu added that the government recognizes that education changes will only be successful if teachers participate in any talks leading to reforms in the sector.
“This explains why the President appointed eight classroom teachers to be members of the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms to ensure their classroom experiences inform the dialogues with the public on the education we want,” he said.
Based on the interim report of the team, the President directed that the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades be housed in elementary schools.
Machogu lauded teachers for providing input to the Working Group, which must have been essential to the formulation of the suggestions.
Regarding higher education, he stated that the Education Charter intends to establish a public university in each county concurrently with the 2012 University Act.
Universities will be required to focus their training on their comparative advantage.
Machogu stated that the government will raise the number of technical universities from three to eight across the country’s eight regions in order to expand access to higher education, cut its cost, and implement a full transition to higher education institutions.
The supply of free sanitary pads for primary and secondary schoolgirls is one of the Education Charter’s other significant initiatives to secure a 100 percent return to school policy for adolescent mothers.
The government also intends to construct low-cost boarding schools in desert regions, provide scholarships to county governments for ECDE students, and protect the safety of students and teachers in areas prone to insecurity.
Regarding Technical and Vocational Training, Machogu stated that the government aims to provide county governments with conditional grants for the development of new institutions.
In addition to the existing 1,200, the government will construct an additional 250 VTCs in wards where none presently exist.
116,000 Teacher Shortage To End In Two Years – Machogu.
