Over 110,000 secondary school teachers to be retrained so as enable them meet the demands of Competency-Based Curriculum.
Teachers Service Commission (TSC) notes that news learning areas introduced under the CBC requires that all teachers to go back to school to gain skills on how to handle the subject adjustments as the secondary schools prepare for a double intake in 2023.
Among those to be retrained include pre-technical and pre-vocational education, life skills, agriculture and health education teachers.
Others are optional subjects such as indigenous languages, Kenya sign language, visual arts and performing arts. Dr Macharia says all home science and biology teachers will have to be retrained to enable them handle health education, those in social studies must be taught how to teach new content on citizenship while those for sports and physical education must be enabled to deal with sports and health.
According to TSC, the teacher education curriculum should be overhauled to meet the special demands of CBC.
“We advise and recommend that the teacher education curriculum should be made flexible and aligned to enable a single teacher to teach a variety of subjects,” said TSC on July 26 in a letter, which is an official advisory on the teacher preparation and requirements ahead of establishment of junior and senior secondary schools in under two years.
Presently, teachers are trained to teach at least two subjects but the demands of the CBC now make it necessary to widen the teaching areas.
TSC has recommended that the three diploma colleges – Kagumo, Kibabii and Lugari—be ordered to admit students for the new subjects “on a demand-driven approach.”
The commission has also fronted Kenya Technical Training College should be directed to upscale the training of teachers in the technical oriented subjects required under CBC.
Hitherto, almost all primary school teachers handling the CBC Grade one to Grade Five have been adequately taken through the new system.