Schools countrywide will reopen today for the third and final term of the year during which some 1.8 million candidates will sit their national examinations.
It’s also the term during which for the first time ever, pupils in Grade Three will also be assessed nationally under the recently introduced Competency-Based Curriculum.
The term will begin a week late after the earlier opening date — August 26 — was rescheduled to pave the way for the National Housing and Population Census.
Poignantly, the term begins when the teaching fraternity is in the grips of intense anxiety arising from leadership wrangling at the Kenya National Union of Teachers and controversy over the implementation of the 2017-2021 Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The disquiet is a result of court orders, which suspended career development guidelines and teacher professional development programmes introduced by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to guide promotions.
As a result, TSC prepared two separate payrolls, one for the Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers and which contained salary increments based on the CBA, and one for Knut members without any pay rise.
This has created animosity between teachers and their employer at a most inauspicious time, when Standard Eight pupils are preparing to sit the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education from October 28, while their Form Four counterparts are gearing up to begin their Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exams on November 4.
Still, a majority of teachers are being trained on the CBC, which is already on a roll.
Given that the third term is the shortest, yet the most sensitive because of the exams, it calls for sobriety, calmness and dedication among the teachers who are the primary drivers of the tests.
This is why the government must rush to sort out the payroll mess created by the TSC, while Knut, which on Friday kicked out its Secretary-General Wilson Sossion, must move to restore stability within the union and assure its members that their interests are safe under the new leadership.
If the turmoil within the teaching fraternity persists, the examinations will be in danger of being botched up and the new curriculum will run the risk of failing at the first hurdle.
The government can invest billions in ensuring the examinations are prepared and administered judiciously and that the CBC is rolled out seamlessly, but if the primary executors of these two national activities are not at peace, all these efforts will come to naught.
This is a high-stakes term when nothing should go wrong.
The TSC should quickly call for talks with the teachers’ unions and sort out the payroll dispute urgently.
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