Teachers have been given an extra week to apply for promotions after the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) portal was rendered inaccessible by a technical glitch since Monday.
The previous deadline was Friday September 8 and there were fears that thousands of teachers would be denied promotions.
Teachers and their unions called on their employer to extend the deadline by at least a week to allow them to apply for the 36, 275 promotions announced in August.
“The applications went on well until September 6, 2023 when [the] system started experiencing an anomaly due to huge traffic. ICT is building two additional servers to address the huge numbers who [did not] beat the application deadline. In view of the above, ICT Directorate is requesting an extension of the advertisement from Friday September 8, 2023 to Friday, September 15 2023,” reads an internal memo seen by the Nation .
"It's been hectic trying to apply. If they can't work on the system, they should allow people to apply manually. I travelled from Nyakach, Kisumu County, and went to the TSC headquarters, but I didn't get any help. I first went to the Kisumu office but they said there was nothing they could do," said a teacher who came to the Nation Centre.
After three years, he was promoted to Grade L (C3) in 2009 and has remained in the same job group ever since.
"I applied for promotion. I was unsuccessful in 2013 and again in 2017, 2021 and the most recent promotions this year. You can imagine my frustration now that I can't access the portal and there are only a few hours left," he said.
The chair of the Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet), Omboko Milemba appealed to TSC to extend the applications period to accommodate more teachers.
“The commission should extend the applications window by at least seven days so that everyone who qualifies gets a chance to apply for promotion. Thousands of teachers risk missing out yet we want all those who are eligible to be interviewed,” he said.
Mr Milemba, who is also the Emuhaya MP, asked Parliament to allocate Sh1.2 billion to the TSC in next month's supplementary budget to sponsor more teachers. The commission was allocated Sh2.2 billion in the budget and Sh1 billion will be used for the current vacancies.
Teachers' unions have blamed the TSC for stagnating teachers' careers, while the commission has blamed the national government for failing to allocate funds for promotions.
Two weeks ago, the TSC sent a text message to all teachers explaining a technical problem with their systems as the country experienced a nationwide power outage.
"TSC is currently experiencing intermittent disruption of online services due to power instability. Please bear with us as the technical team works to restore online services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause," the message read.
The vast majority of the vacancies advertised by the commission will be for lower cadre teachers, as opposed to the previous vacancies which were mainly for teachers in administrative positions.
The highest number of vacancies will be for Senior Master IV in a regular secondary school, with 12,716 vacancies to be filled. This is followed by vacancies for Senior Teacher II in ordinary primary schools.
There are 1,049 vacancies for promotion to headteacher and 1,930 vacancies for deputy headteacher in regular primary schools and 1,928 vacancies for secondary teacher I in a regular school.
This indicates a glaring shortage of administrators in public primary schools, many of which are run by teachers in acting capacities.
