In order to alleviate the senior school staffing gap before the Grade 10 rollout next year, TSC urgently requires 25,839 teachers in total.
TSC CEO Dr. Nancy Macharia presented the first CBC cohorts with a dire outlook after making the announcement before Parliament.
According to Macharia, there is now a 98,261 teacher shortfall in junior and senior secondary schools.
She was answering concerns about hiring, promoting, and deploying teachers nationwide when she appeared before the National Assembly Constitutional Implementation Oversight Committee on April 8.
Macharia said the Commission requires a total of 72,422 teachers to address the teacher shortage in JSS.
In total TSC needs 149,350 teachers to effectively implement the Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) in Grades 7, 8 and 9.
However the Commission was allocated additional budget for 36,000 teacher recruitment this year.
Of these 18,000 will be employed on permanent and pensionable terms and the other 18,000 on internship terms.
These teachers will specifically be hired to address the staffing gaps in junior and senior schools.
Macharia said currently TSC has employed 76,928 teachers in junior secondary representing 51.5% of the requirement.
These are 39,550 junior secondary school teachers who were first recruited on internship terms but have since been confirmed to permanent terms in January 2025.
8,378 P1 teachers who were deployed to JSS in 2023 and 2024 and 9,000 JSS teachers recruited on permanent and pensionable terms.
TSC also recruited a total of 20,000 JSS teachers in January on a one year internship term after it was allocated sh 4.8 billion.
TSC has so far retooled a total of 229,292 teachers on Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) and Competency Based Assessment (CBA) since April 2019.
A total of 60,642 JSS teachers have been retooled from May 2023 to November 2024.
The Commission is under pressure to address a looming teacher crisis in JSS as currently the teacher to class ratio is 1:1;
The Commission is also planning to retool a total of 7,000 secondary school Principals in preparation for Grade 10 rollout.