The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has announced that it is changing how teachers across the country are promoted during service. The TSC says that it is replacing the traditional method of promotion which involves competitive interviews with a new form of automatic promotions.
According to Acting TSC chief executive officer Eveleen Mitei, the automatic promotions will benefit teachers who are in specific cadre grades. P1 teachers who hold certificates, diploma teachers and teachers with Bachelor’s degree will benefit from the automatic promotions.
Under the new shift in the TSC promotion policy, teachers who join the service at Grade B5 will be eligible for automatic promotion to Grade C1 after serving for a minimum of three years.
Those serving in Grade C1 will be eligible for TSC’s automatic promotion to Grade C2 after completing three years of satisfactory service. The same period of three years will apply to Grade C2 teachers seeking promotion to Grade C3.
“Bachelor’s degree holders; teachers serving in Grade C2 will qualify for automatic promotion to Grade C3 after three years of service, subject to satisfactory performance,” The commission chief executive officer said in response to the National Assembly’s Committee on Education.
While announcing the new promotion changes, the TSC stated that it has developed a Teacher Recruitment Policy that governs the recruitment process to ensure that the process is carried out in a lawful and constitutional manner.
“The key principle driving recruitment and deployment of teachers is that the [TSC] is an Equal Opportunity Employer that abides by the tenets of the law espoused under the constitution, the TSC Act, the National Cohesion and Integration Act among other pieces of legislation,” the commission stated.
In May this year, the commission announced that it had promoted 25,252 teachers after waiving a key requirement that educators serve at least three years in one grade before moving up.
The TSC said that 5,291 teachers were promoted despite not meeting the three-year threshold. Most of these teachers took up principal and deputy headteacher roles, where the number of eligible candidates fell short of demand.
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“In the just concluded promotion exercise, the number of teachers who had met the three-year requirement in the feeder grades fell significantly short of the number of vacancies,” the TSC announced in a statement dated May 22.
