The Cabinet Secretary for Education, Mr. Ezekiel Machogu, has said pegging entry-level qualifications into Teacher Training to a Mean grade of C Plain in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) does not compromise the standards of teachers required to teach the primary education curriculum.
Mr. Machogu said the entry requirements that demand students to have scored Grade C in all subjects’ clusters apart from having a mean grade of C in KCSE were restrictive and punitive.
The Cabinet Secretary made the remarks when he officially opened Mandera Training College on Tuesday this week.
On the occasion were the Mandera Governor, Mr. Mohamed Khalif, the Mandera Senator, Mr. Ali Roba, the Chief Executive Officer of the National Council for Nomadic Education in Kenya (NACONEK), and Mr. Haroun Yusuf, among others.
Under the clustered requirements, applicants to TTCs need to have a mean grade of C Plain and a C Plain in Mathematics, English, Kiswahili, Humanities, and Sciences.
Mr. Machogu said the government will implement a recommendation by the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms (PWPER) to the effect that recruitment into TTCs be pegged at C Plain without the clusters requirement.
“Removal of the cluster requirements does not mean we are lowering the standards of teacher education and training,” Mr. Machogu said.
He said some of the primary school teachers in the 70s and 80s had not attained the equivalent of C Plain in the secondary school certification yet were ‘excellent’ teachers.
He said the removal of the clusters had led to the enrolment of more prospective teachers into TTCs, saying the cluster requirements had led to a steep decline in enrolment.
The CS, for instance, said Mandera TTC had attracted only 23 students under the cluster requirements but had now enrolled 668 students following the removal of the cluster requirement.
The 33 public Teacher Training Colleges had enrolled some 3,3,22 students under the cluster requirement but had since enrolled 18,670 students after the removal of the cluster requirement.
The Cabinet Secretary at the same time said that the government had come up with measures to prevent early exposure to the examinations in the forthcoming KCPE and KCSE examinations.
He said examinations will be picked from containers two times a day, unlike in the past, when they were picked once in the morning.
He said centre managers will pick the second paper to be done in the afternoon to prevent possible early exposure to the second paper.
By Hamdi Buthul
