About 60,000 teachers will be trained in the Competency-Based Curriculum for junior secondary students.
Training will begin in April.
Teachers Service Commission CEO Nancy Macharia on Tuesday said the Ministry of Education has trained 229,000 teachers in CBC so far.
The system is ready for full implementation of CBC, she said in Mombasa.
“We have been training progressively as we go to upper grades. I assure the public that teachers are ready for the implementation of CBC," she said
"They are well trained. We shall continue training them progressively."
Macharia said more teachers not yet employed by TSC have gone back to college to be trained in CBC.
“Teachers who are currently training in colleges will not be re-tooled when we will be employing them because they would already have been trained,"she said.
"The ones who were employed, we shall continue training and re-tooling them on CBC.”
Macharia supervised the distribution of examination papers and monitored the test in Kisauni subcounty in Mombasa.
The TSC boss said Kenya has a shortage of around 100,000 teachers.
“As a ministry, we always propose 20,000 teachers every financial year," she said.
"The ministry always gets a budget to recruit 5,000 teachers and we are hopeful we will get more this time because we are competing for limited resources and it's an election year," she said.
Macharia said that if the Education Ministry can get 20,000 teachers, it would have closed the gap in five years because access and transition have increased.
“Apart from the government giving us money to recruit the 5,000 teachers, they also give us money to recruit intern teachers to try and close the gap.
“We have requested intern teachers in addition to the permanent and pensionable teachers, so we are waiting to see what the government will give,” she said.
On the KCSE exams, Macharia said the ongoing cheating allegation is not leakage, but early exposure of papers.
“The exam cheating is not because of leakage as such, it is just an exposure where when the exams are picked at 6am in the morning,
"Some of these bad people go and open earlier than stipulated by Kenya National Examination Council regulations and they take pictures.
“That is what has been happening and these people have been apprehended. Since then, we have not heard of early exposure,” Macharia said.
Action will be taken against teachers involved once they have a full report.
“I can confidently say we are doing better because the security agencies came in very fast and, of course, we have seen people being arraigned in court,” she said.
Disciplinary action will also be taken against the the teachers involved.
“We cannot allow errant teachers to taint the lives of our children,” she said.
(Edited by V. Graham)
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