The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has introduced Teacher Professional Development (TPD) modules. These are refresher courses that Kenyan teachers employed by TSC will partake for a lifetime. Teachers will do the courses in 6 modules each taking five years.
According to the TSC CEO Dr. Nancy Macharia, teachers employed by the commission will renew their certificates every five years. The teachers will have to pay dearly for those courses.
Each year, it will require a teacher to part with KES 6000 excluding accommodation, transport costs and several other incidentals. This is because TSC has tasked only four universities to offer the courses. As a result, each teacher must set aside roughly KES 30000 per year for TPD training.
Refresher courses are for perfection and learning. The world is changing at is alarming rate and new inventions come in day by day. But capacity building is the duty of the employer. The employer should never transfer the cost to the employee.
Teachers have always gone for further studies
The program is just unfair and punitive. A few teachers spent a fortune in retraining and earning undergraduate degrees hoping to raise their social well-being through promised promotions.
Secondary school teachers rushed to do Masters Degrees. But the certificates have no impact on their strained pay slips.
This has demoralized the teachers a great deal. Telling the same teachers to pay for another un-paying discourse will crush their remaining ego squarely. May this intention die before even seeing the floor of the courts.
Why would the commission come up with such outrageous programs? It started by the government’s undermining of KNUT since 2010 when President Uhuru was finance minister.
This was followed by the psychological damage of performance management on the teachers. Then came TPAD. This was born from a trip of TSC to the UK, sponsored by the British Council.
All these point to a concerted effort by TSC to make teachers’ lives miserable and restrict people from entering the profession. Kenyan teachers must resist this oppression of TPD Modules.
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