A tussle has emerged over who is to foot the bill to retrain a total of 750,000 teachers in the newly rolled out Teacher Professional Development programme.
The programme was unveiled by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) and is expected to cost the taxpayer a whopping Ksh4.5 billion.
With this approach, it means that all the tutors will be expected to renew their certificates every five years.
In the initial rollout of the programme, the Commission had indicated that the teachers themselves would foot the bill of acquiring their own certifications.
This sparked widespread protests, with the teachers, through their unions, pushing the employer to meet the refresher training costs.
The National Assembly’s Education Committee, however, is of the view that the government should include the programme in its annual budget, so that teachers do not bear the burden of bettering their skills as requiring by TSC.
The committee recommends that the Teacher Professional Development programme being a training initiated by the employer should be paid for by the government,” stated the committee in a statement according to the Business Daily.
If approved, Kenyans would be forced to dig deeper into their pockets to send hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country back to class.
