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TSC PROMOTIONS- HOW TO DEAL WITH THE STAGNATION OF TEACHERS IN JOB GROUPS.
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 sub county and county schools.
TSC has been focusing so much on MEAN SCORES which are influenced by a raft of factors beyond the Teachers. For example apart from the sub county 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. In fact most of the time they find themselves playing the rehabilitative roles just to keep the learners in schools .
In a typical sub county school you find you have students who in the evening change to “Muguka vendors” Boda boda operators , bar tenders etc . Over the weekend they convert themselves into ” Mjengo” fundis not to mention the many nursing mothers . 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 stable students who joined with very high mark and many of whom come from well empowered supportive backgrounds.
New criteria for TSC promotions
To make the promotion criteria very scientific and fair I suggest TSC adopts a mechanism that takes into account the number of years served in a certain job group 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
Over ten years 70 marks .
Ofcourse this should also be pegged on positive report from the agents on the ground on teacher discipline , commitment etc.
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To take care of Performance and productivity I suggest TSC develops a mechanism that captures value added performance ( VAP) that 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 etc.
Even the performance in Co- curricular activities should be analysed against the date 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. If this criteria is used there will be no more stagnation in the job groups and all teachers will be happy..