The National Assembly Education Committee has pressed the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to provide detailed constituency-level data on staffing after MPs raised alarm over regional disparities in teacher deployment.
Lawmakers accused the commission of presenting polished recruitment policies that fail to address on-the-ground realities. While TSC insists its process is transparent, merit-based, and guided by data on student populations and subject demand, MPs countered that many schools are struggling with acute shortages while others are relatively well-staffed.
Appearing before the committee, TSC officials explained that vacancies are identified from exits or shortages, proportionally distributed to counties and sub-counties, advertised publicly, and filled through structured interviews. They maintained that the system prioritizes marginalized regions and reserves 5% of jobs for persons with disabilities.
But MPs painted a different picture. Aldai legislator Marianne Kitany decried cases where schools with more than 300 pupils have only one TSC teacher, leaving parents to pay additional teachers from their pockets. “This is double taxation. Parents are taxpayers already, yet they must still employ teachers privately,” she said.
Mombasa Woman Representative Zamzam Mohamed joined in, saying the commission’s policies had created hidden inequities. “We have teachers with just two years of experience already employed, while others with more than a decade of training remain jobless,” she stated. She called for transparency through release of comprehensive staffing records by constituency.
Lawmakers also demanded reforms to recruitment criteria, which they said unfairly favor science teachers over arts and social sciences, skewing curriculum delivery. They warned that persistent neglect of humanities could undermine education balance.
The MPs insisted that a robust audit of teacher distribution would expose the inequities masked by the current uniform allocation model. “We cannot talk of fairness when some regions are saturated while others are left to struggle,” Kitany added.
In response, the committee resolved to pursue the matter further by requiring TSC to submit teacher staffing data, complete with TSC numbers, postings, and student population statistics.
The MPs maintained that without full transparency, the gap between policy and reality would continue widening, leaving learners disadvantaged and trained teachers underutilized.
