5,000 promoted teachers get higher pay

Salaries and allowances for nearly 5,000 teachers who passed interviews for promotion will go up from next month.

The new salaries will be backdated to July 1, according to details released Wednesday by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC).

“Their salaries and allowances will be adjusted accordingly and accrued arrears paid,” said a statement from the TSC head of communications, Mr Kihumba Kamotho, on behalf of secretary Gabriel Lengoiboni.

The 4,855 teachers will be moved from their previous grades to Job Group M and N. Of that number, 4,336 will move from Job Group M to Principal Graduate/Approved Teacher II on Job Group N. The other 519 have been promoted to Senior Graduate/Approved Teacher or Job Group M.

Some 10,952 teachers had been interviewed for promotion.

SPECIAL NEEDS INSTITUTIONS

Those promoted have been serving in public secondary and primary schools. Other beneficiaries were working in technical and teacher training colleges, special needs institutions, national polytechnics and the Centre for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education.

The secondary school teachers promoted to Job Group N were mainly heads of department, deputy principals and a few principals. Primary school teachers promoted to Job Group N and Job Group M were mainly headteachers.

Those moved to Job Group N will earn improved house allowances with those in Nairobi earning Sh24,000, up from Sh20,000. Those outside Nairobi will get Sh1,000 more from what they have been earning, bringing their allowance to Sh13,000.

A teacher in Nairobi will take home an extra Sh12,000 in house allowance at the end of this month if the backdated allowances are factored in in the September salary.

“Their promotion follows a rigorous interview process which started in the last quarter of 2013 and was concluded in March this year,” Mr Kamotho said.

He said the promotion letters for individual teachers would be issued “as they get ready” due to their high number.

“Those who were not successful should not fall prey to fraudsters who may pretend to be in a position to influence their promotion.

“The promotion process was open, transparent and accountable,” Mr Kamotho said in apparent reference to a Nation expose on Tuesday that revealed the commission had interdicted four officials and called in the police after it unearthed a payroll scandal in which the four irregularly promoted staff before demanding a share of the increased salaries.

TSC accused the officials of manipulating its payroll system and conniving with teachers whom they moved to higher job grades, thus enabling them to receive irregular pay increases.

The beneficiaries then shared part of the extra money with the TSC officials.

Twenty teachers had benefited from the irregular promotions that had cost the commission Sh2 million by the time the irregularity was detected in March 2014.

Mr Kamotho acknowledged the payroll anomaly.

“This was detected through the commission’s regular payroll analysis and audit since TSC has in-built controls and mechanisms to detect any manipulation of the payroll,” he said.

The issue was being treated as fraud.

“Teachers and TSC secretariat staff suspected to have participated or colluded in the fraudulent tampering with the payroll have been interdicted in line with service regulations for teachers and secretariat staff,” he said.

In addition, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations has taken over the criminal component of the matter.

Last year, teachers’ unions put the government to task for failing to budget for the promotion of teachers and threatened to strike over the anomaly.

Later, both the unions and the government agreed that teachers who had qualified and had applied for promotions by December 19, 2013, would be promoted after a nine-member committee verified their credentials to ensure they met minimum standards.

REGULATIONS

The Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut) had been pressing for 53,000 of its members to be promoted but the TSC said only 6,675 merited promotions in accordance with set regulations.

In the 2013/14 budget, TSC was allocated Sh3.5 billion for teacher promotions but has only received Sh600 million so far.