Thousands Locked Out Of Kenya Teacher Training Colleges over Grades
The new qualification requirements for admission into teacher training colleges have locked out thousands of Form Four leavers, the Nation has established.
The new requirements set by the Ministry of Education are likely to deal a huge blow to the implementation of the competency-based curriculum (CBC) as only a few applicants are eligible for enrolment.
Thousands of applicants who had applied for diploma training in primary and early childhood development education did not meet the grade set last month while those who qualified will hardly fill the vacancies available in both public and private TTCs.
· Qualifications
To qualify, one must have a mean Grade of C (plain) in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exam, a C in mathematics, English, Kiswahili, one science and one humanity to align pre-service teacher training to the demands of CBC.
As a result, the certificate in teacher education, commonly referred to as P1 will be phased out, with the last cohort having graduated in December last year. The trainees are scheduled to report on May 3 in the 32 public colleges and the course will take three years.
There are over 200 registered private teacher training colleges, according to the Kenya Economic Survey.
However, checks by the Nation in the counties paint a grim picture, validating fears raised by stakeholders earlier that the bar had been set too high. Sub-county directors of education, who were managing the recruitment, had been given up to Friday last week to file their returns.
In some sub-counties, none of the applicants who showed interest qualified, with some stakeholders calling for a review of the criteria.
Only three applicants in Lamu County qualified. The County Director of Education Joshua Kaaga said one was from Lamu East, two from Lamu West and none from Lamu Central.
It was the same case in Tindiret sub-county, which had 53 applicants but none met the criteria. Turkana South and Turkana East did not register any candidates. In Tiaty West, all the 20 people who submitted their applications in Chemolingot failed to qualify.
“It was a big challenge for us to get qualified applicants in Lamu. All the three are males,” said Mr Kaaga.
