Agony awaits teachers who were irregularly promoted as they may lose huge amounts in salaries. This after the teachers service commission, TSC, boss Dr. Nancy Macharia ordered for the clean up of the payroll. A number of classroom teachers have been earning salaries ear marked for administrators a move that could the commission recover the over payments accumulated for the last 3 years.
The teachers’ employer collected data for institutional administrators 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.
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The Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers, Kuppet, has at the same time written to TSC expressing their dissatisfaction with the manner in which the promotions have been handled. Kuppet has faulted the commission for taking the unilateral decision adding that they should be fully involved in the process of cleaning up the payroll. According to a protest letter by to TSC, the union says teachers who have been earning higher perks should not be victimized.
NEW JOB GRADES
Following recommendations by the salaries and remuneration commission, SRC, the teachers’ employer in 2017 categorized all tutors using a grading structure of eleven(11) levels. All P1 teachers in Job Group‘G’ were upgraded to Job Group‘H’and then converted to grade B5. Similarly, all teachers in Job group ‘H’ were upgraded to Job Group‘J’ and then converted to grade C1.
The position of senior master was introduced in post primary institutions. The responsibilities of administrators were recognized for commensurate remuneration. Responsibility allowance was phased out forthwith.
Special school allowance was retained until 30th June 2018 and subsequently changed to special salary. This comes as the commission prepares to implement the final phase of of the 2017-2021 CBA for teachers. Read finer details here.
