TSC set to promote school administrators; demote classroom teachers who were erroneously promoted

The Teachers Service Commission, TSC, has come out clean on the state of promotions for teachers. According to the commission a number of school administrators who are due for promotion have not been moved. Instead, some classroom teachers are enjoying higher perks due to an error during data collection by TSC county and sub county directors.

The teachers’ employer  collected data for institutional administrators in in June, 2017. This was supposed to validate and move the administrators to higher grades once the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) was to be implemented.  But, TSC boss Dr Nancy Macharia now says the commission’s field officers provided inaccurate data leading to disparities in promotions for institutional heads, their deputies, senior teachers and senior masters.

“It has been established that some of you (TSC field officers) provided inaccurate and misleading data leading to errenous conversions (promotions to the new grades after implementing the SRC salary guidelines in 2017),” says Dr Macharia.

“Classroom teachers were converted to grades exclusively reserved for institutional administrators, teachers serving as deputy or senior teachers were wrongly captured as heads while in other instances, staffing levels in terms of required administrators in a school exceeded the optimum establishments contrary to the established staffing norms,” she further explains.

Related content;

• TSC grades and qualifications for various administrative positions in schools; complete guide
• List of all administrative positions per school category as set by TSC
• Designation codes for all TSC teachers’ job groups.
• A detailed analysis of all TSC teachers’ grades/ Job groups
• TSC- Promotion requirements for teachers

COLLECT DATA AFRESH

A number of school deputy heads and principals have been crying foul over the move by the TSC to snub them.

But, the commission now seeks to recollect the data and clean its payroll. Dr Macharia explains that having unreliable data in the TSC data base has ‘negatively affected the operations of the commission in terms of payroll management and the process of selection, appointment and deployment of new administrators’.

The commission has now directed the field officers to recollect the data and submit the same to the headquarter by June 30, 2020.

“You are hereby directed to critically analyze the data and reconfirm all institutional administrators,” says the TSC boss in her latest circular to the field officers.

Also required is data for schools with extra administrators (teachers with minimum of grade C4 in secondary schools and their counterparts in primary schools having C2) so that they can be appointed to serve in their respective positions.

The issue of teachers’ promotions has been thorny. Most affected are tutors serving in grade C3 (Secondary Teacher) with some having stayed in the job group for over 15 years. and, this has been worsened by the commission’s failure to advertise promotion vacancies for these and other classroom teachers; citing budgetary constraints.

TSC is set to implement the fourth phase of the 2017-2021 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that was agreed between the Commission and teachers’ unions. The Commission has already implemented the first, second and phases; that were effected in 1st July, 2017, 1st July, 2018 and July 1, 2019 respectively. Read full article here; what teachers will earn per job group after TSC implements the fourth phase of CBA in July, 2020.