The Ministry of Education has extended the application window for early childhood education and primary school diploma courses.
It would suggest the ministry failed to get sufficient number of applicants for the Diploma in Primary Teacher Education (DPTE) and Diploma in Early Childhood Teacher Education (DECTE) at the expiry of the earlier deadline last month.
In the new announcement by Early Learning and Basic Education Principal Secretary Julius Jwan, qualified Form Four leavers have between today and April 20 to apply for the training tailored to go in tandem with the implementation of the competency based curriculum (CBC).
Various stakeholders in education last month said the new requirements for entry into the training programmes were set too high and would leave out thousands of Form Four leavers interested in joining the teaching profession.
Applicants for DPTE should have a mean grade of a C (plain) and the same grade in mathematics, English, Kiswahili, one humanity and a science. Candidates with disabilities will be admitted with a mean grade of C- (minus) and the same grade in the cluster subjects. To qualify for the DECTE, applicants must have a mean grade of C plain.
“The duration of the course shall be three years in accordance with the approved curriculum designs,” Dr Jwan said.
The Nation established that the candidates who qualified were so few that they can hardly fill vacancies in the 32 public teacher training colleges. Private colleges will also hope to enrol from the same pool as the entry requirements apply to them as well.
According to the Kenya Economic Survey, there are over 200 registered private teacher training colleges. In some sub-counties, none of the applicants who showed interest qualified for admission, with some stakeholders calling for a review of the selection criteria.
“We already compiled the names and forwarded it to the ministry even though the number was too low. You may find that a student had good grades in all other subjects but had a C- (minus) in mathematics. This disqualified them,” Kwale County director of education Martin Cheruyiot told the Nation at the time. The county registered 30 successful applicants. It has a new TTC that is set to begin operations in May this year with a capacity of 200 students.
Although the government has not released the official number of successful applicants, the counties sampled by the Nation at the close of the recruitment exercise showed there is a real possibility of high under-enrolment.
The students were set to report to colleges on May 3, 2021 but this might change after all institutions of learning were shut amid a surge in Covid-19 cases.
The introduction of the new training programmes will see the phasing out of the certificate in teacher education, popularly known as P1, whose last cohort graduated in December last year. In 2019, enrolment of P1 trainees in TTCs stood at 31,737 with public colleges accounting for 11,111 trainees while private entities had 18,589 teacher trainees. Some 2,037 teacher trainees were enrolled in the diploma programme.
