TSC to conduct mass head count, registration of teachers

The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) will roll out a mass count and bio-metric registration of all secondary and primary school teachers in the Country. The exercise was initially scheduled to commence in May last year (2020) could not take off as schools were closed due to outbreak of the Covid19 pandemic.

But, the Commission has now put in place concrete plans to roll out the head count in May this year when schools reopen for third term.

“The biometric registration shall entail validation of data of teachers in all public primary and secondary schools, Teacher Training Colleges, Centre for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education in Africa (CEMASTEA) and Kenya Institute of Special Education (KISE),” the Commission said via a presser.

It is believed that there are many ghost workers in the Commission who lead to massive losses of government funds. The biometric registration of teachers will therefore weed out the ghost workers with all the teachers under the commission’s payroll expected to undergo fresh registration to verify their distribution, utilisation and teaching specialisation in public schools.

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All teachers under the TSC payroll will undergo fresh listing from the school level. Earlier on TSC Deputy Commission Secretary Kennedy Mulunda revealed that this exercise would cover all the 321,811 teachers in 32,004 basic education institutions across the country.

“We want to update the existing information on the teachers’ biodata and validate their requirement in all public schools and teacher training colleges by size and learner enrollment,” Mulunda had said.

The biometric registration of the teachers will involve the usage of their fingerprints to capture details. Additionally, each teacher will have to produce their national identity card or birth certificate and any other relevant identification documents such as employment or designation letters.

The exercise will also reveal teacher distribution based on subject combinations and will unearth staffing gaps that will inform training needs for various subject areas.

Seven counties will participate in the pilot roll-out of the program with the national exercise scheduled for August/ September 2021.

Uasin Gishu, Homa Bay, Bungoma, Nyeri, Kilifi, Kitui and Garissa were selected because they present both rural and urban setups with 143 institutions sampled from the areas consisting of primary, secondary and teachers training colleges.

To monitor daily attendance by teachers, the Commission shall then install Biometric gadgets in schools for teachers to clock in and out. Currently, teachers manually sign in and out of school.

The electronic registration of teachers will therefore expose teachers who miss lessons without written permissions. This enlisting of teachers is also expected to help the Commission to balance the teaching staff since it will unravel the imbalances across all public schools.

Related news; TSC to get real time school attendance by all teachers through Biometric Registration