TSC boss insists teachers ready for new curriculum rollout

Teacher Service Commission (TSC) boss Dr Nancy Macharia on Thursday assured the public that teachers are well prepared for the implemention the Competency Based Cirriculum (CBC).

This comes after Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) through their Secretary General Wilson Sossion pushed for the suspension of the new CBC terming it as “developed by a foreign NGO” and “hurriedly done”.

However, Dr Macharia said that about 170,000 teachers have been trained to handle the CBC up to Grade 3.

“These teachers were trained between 2017 and December 2018. This year between April, August and December, we intend to train additional 110,000 teachers. After training this teachers, we will have the capacity to handle Grade 4 to Grade 6. This will enable us continue rolling out the Competence Based Curriculum (CBC),” said Dr Macharia.

According to her, the TSC will be handling the capacity building program and it will collaborate with the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development so that it (KICD) will train teachers to interpret the curriculum design and KNEC will aid the teachers in assessment.

“Our teachers will be all rounded in handling this new CBC. More importantly, capacity building, which is a continuous process will continue for as long as the teacher is in service. We shall continue to refresh our teachers as we continue with the curriculum,” she added.

[ Read: Prof Magoha promises to deliver to every Kenyan Child ]

The new curriculum 2-6-6-3 that is supposed to replace the 8-4-4 which was rolled out at the beginning of the year has faced backlash from the teachers who claimed that they are ill-prepared and poorly trained, therefore they cannot deliver the new CBC in a new report.

The report survey’s that 37 counties reported that schools are not prepared for the new curriculum citing foreign interests whose only intention is to profit.

“Unfortunately, the impact of education is sub-Suharan African countries has been minimized since African countries have often been pressurized to adopt unrealistic reforms by a small number of nameless and faceless experts working in international organizations such as UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF, IMF, World Bank who have a hidden agenda and normally exert their influence indirectly behind the scenes,” reads part of the report.

Further, KNUT wants the implementation of the CBC in grade four stopped for more evaluation during the piloting phase and reports its results publicly.

[ See also: Publisher to train 7,500 teachers on new curriculum ]

“Since no research was done to justify the change from Outcomes Based Curriculum to CBC framework, education stakeholders should commission summative evaluation of the pilot phase of CBC to determine its effect on learners,” says the report dubbed Teachers Preparedness for the Implementation of the Competence Based Curriculum in Pre-Primary and Lower Primary Grades in Kenya.

The new curriculum has been faced with a lot of retaliation that made the Sports Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed, who was Education Cabinet Secretary to postpone its implementation to 2020.

However, she later changed to executing it this year after being pressured by stakeholders who said that there was no going back on the new curriculum.

The new Education Cabinet Secretary Prof George Magoha will be faced with an uphill task on the execution of the new curriculum which he vowed to implement if approved.