A TALE OF TWO TEACHERS’ UNIONS, TSC AND THE KENYAN TEACHER

Let us begin this way – by way of two pieces of speculation. The first, perhaps the most obvious one, is that Teachers Service Commission (TSC) CEO, Nancy Macharia is way more qualified for the job than I am. That is why she is the CEO of TSC, and I am not. So, while I may from time to time find space to make noise in the newspapers, she does not – not because she cannot write; but because she spends her time making the big decisions that have got grave ramifications to the teaching and learning public. One of those decisions is this week’s announcement of Teacher Professional Development Programme (TPD).

Speculation number two: anyone in this country, with an IQ about double digits, will most certainly agree that head of KUPPET (Kenya Union of Post Primary Teachers) and the head of KNUT (Kenya National Union of Teachers) have interests of teachers at heart, than I would be expected to have. After all, teachers entrusted them with responsibility to vouch for their welfare. They voted for them in their thousands.

This love for their members must have been evident when Misori of KUPPET and Oyuu of KNUT, went to assist the TSC announce a very important matter: the need to retrain teachers and issue them with licenses. It must have been because of this love that earlier in the year, the two unions signed a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that had zero financial increment. They however lovingly bargained for more paternity leave. They now assume that teachers will now very easily retrieve money from the increased paternity leave, and use it to pay for retraining.

After many months of defending the Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) saying that teachers have been well trained, it took the sunshine of 22^nd September, 2021 for the TSC to admit that indeed teachers shall need retraining for five years, at their own cost, to be able to make CBC a success. Forget that Kenyan teachers have been so attractive to foreign nations, who have come for them to go and teach their children. Forget that the Ministry of Education (MoE) has severally said that teachers do not need lengthy training to deliver CBC. What you should remember is that a few universities have been selected (or is it (hand)picked?) to offer the retraining.

By her own admission during the announcement for the TPD programme, CEO Macharia observed that teachers will be given an opportunity to attend the retraining in their localities. It must therefore be taken as purely accidental that all the institutions picked for this programme are in the Nairobi Metropolitan area. It must also be treated as a matter of pure hindsight that of the four: Mount Kenya University, Riara University, Kenyatta University and Kenya Institute of Management, there is only one public university. We must not stoop too low to questioning this arrangement, but we must wonder how cheaper it might have been for teachers at the Coast, North Eastern and Western to attend the said programme in their regions.

The MoE, TSC and some voices in the general public have supported the idea of retraining and periodic of licensing teachers. They have compared teaching to Law, and have wondered why teachers should not have additional training like lawyers do when they attend the Kenya School of Law (KSL) for example. What they forget is that in the Kenya School of Law, lawyers learn issues of methodology; which thing trainee teachers are trained on at university and teacher training colleges, before they compound the training by going on teaching practice.

In teacher training institutions, the programmes are designed in such a way that the methodology training, which lawyers undergo at the Kenya School of Law is undertaken by teacher trainees in the course of their studies and training in teacher training institutions within three or four years before graduation. At the Kenya School of Law, for example, lawyers are taken through Advocate Training Programme (ATP) where they are engaged on the nitty gritties of methodology such as: how to dress, how to stand before a judge, make opening remarks, concluding remarks, draw judgments, and gather information from judgments read.

At the end of one year, these lawyers proceed on a six month practicum, which they call pupillage. Here, they work under an established advocate (pupil master) with the trainees as pupils. This is a replica of what happens during teacher training. Before teacher trainees proceed on to one term’s practicum – called Teaching Practice – they will have been taught how to present themselves before class, how to dress, draw lesson plans, schemes of work, make introductory remarks, build up the lesson and make concluding remarks. It is therefore lazy (for lack of a better word) for anyone one to say that extra training after graduation is needed to make teachers more proficient as lawyers after a diploma at Kenya School of Law.

The quality of the Kenyan teacher may not be in dire straits, contrary to what the Union officials and TSC sought to portray when announcing the upcoming reforms. We have Kenyan teachers working abroad, and they are not retrained for years upon going there. Recently, there was a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) for which Kenyan teachers were being sought to go and teach English and Kiswahili in America. This would not be the case, if the USA knew that they were trooping ill-trained teachers to go and teach American children.

We have had this country sign agreements to have Kenyan teachers go to Seychelles and Rwanda. Even if improving the quality of teacher training was the issue, the matter of lengthy and punitive training period needed looking into. For even, on the issue of cost, the cost goes higher when you consider issues such as transport and accommodation for the length of the retraining. Besides, it is impossible to forget that this very TSC, under this very CEO, came up with reforms that frustrated many teachers and stopped them from going for further studies during holidays.

As for KNUT and KUPPET, it is all strategic to be diplomatic with the TSC after former Secretary General of KNUT Wilson Sossion was frustrated out of office in the manner he was. However, the brutal reality is that unionism should be the antithesis of the employer’s demands and directives. A union should be sceptical of the employer’s whims, and wary, in the same way ice is to heat.

Even if KUPPET and KNUT had to be diplomatic and play ball in a calculated way, it would have been better to negotiate on who is to fund the retraining. For as you all know, it is impossible for teachers to pay for it using the increased paternity leave that the two unions won for them – for paternity leave is the only thing they achieved in the otherwise zero CBA they calmly signed.