The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) plans to re-register all teachers across the country starting next week.
Documents seen by The Sunday Standard show that all teachers will be recruited from the school level
Identification and data collection from teachers will be carried out at the zonal level, the smallest data collection center is the school,” he said.
This means that teachers who are currently paid without proper documents will be sent home.
Irregular recipients of TSC registration numbers without proper procedures will also be identified and removed.
The pilot phase of biometric registration will be conducted between 29 and 2 in seven districts before being rolled out across the country, the TSC concept said. Plans for this process will begin next week.
A total of 143 primary, secondary and teacher training schools across Uasin Gishu, Homa Bay, Bungoma, Nyeri, Kilifi, Kitui and Garissa will be selected comparatively for the trial phase.
The exercise will involve all public primary, secondary and tertiary schools, curriculum support staff and special programs in all 47 districts.
The TSC will hold a meeting of education stakeholders at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) on Thursday next week and will launch a concept note for public participation.
On September 20, a census kit and software will be purchased that will be used to register the biometric teacher trial.
The training equipment will be configured between August 29 and September 10, at which time the user training manual will be produced.
The TSC document, titled “Biometric Registration of Teachers in Basic Education Institutions”, says the list will be expanded to include teachers in other government institutions under the TSC.
The push comes against the backdrop of teacher conflicts that continue to be offered by employers.
Latest information
The latest data released by the TSC before the biometric registration meeting of stakeholders said there are 316,662 teachers in primary and secondary schools across the country.
Of these, the TSC document states there are around 217,281 teachers in 22,633 primary schools. Another 99,381 teachers currently serve in 8,865 secondary schools.
A group of teachers contrasted another tabled in Parliament last week which showed there were 305,568 teachers in primary and secondary schools.
There are approximately 211,046 teachers in primary schools and 94,522 teachers in secondary schools, according to documents submitted before the National Assembly’s education committee.
According to TSC, the main accreditation process is aimed at examining the distribution, utilization and teaching skills of teachers in all public education institutions.
The commission will also help update the bio-data of existing teachers and validate the requirements of teachers in all public schools and training colleges in terms of student size and population.
The result of the strike will challenge the long-held belief that thousands of teachers have received irregular withdrawals from the commission’s salary for many years.
The Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut) and the Kenya Union of Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet) earlier spoke out against teachers’ employers for failing to clear the rolls.
contradictory numbers
In 2009, a report commissioned by Performance Monitor found conflicting teachers in documents sent by TSC.
An analysis of documents submitted to the department showed that more than 20,000 teachers could not be registered.
Meanwhile, TSC salaries for November stood at 227,581 teachers against 207,554 posted by provincial leaders at the same time.
The revelation came during an investigation by the department, which eliminated the implementation of the declaration of wealth by government officials.
The closest TSC came to smoking a ghost teacher was in 2015 when employers approached insurance brokers to arrange a multi-billion shilling medical scheme.
The company has released a list of biometric teachers which includes the teacher’s TSC number, ID number and mobile phone number.
The plan is to check the data with TSC, the Communications Authority of Kenya and the National Population Register Database to ensure three-way matching.