Tutors attached to Kenya Union of Post-Primary Education Teachers (KUPPET) on Tuesday, March 7, piled pressure on President William Ruto to call for a crisis meeting owing to the crisis witnessed in the Junior Secondary Schools (JSS) implementation.
Speaking to the media, KUPPET Chairman Omboko Milemba sought the dissolution of the Presidential Working Party on Education Reform due to the confusion regarding the transition of Grade 7 learners.
He claimed that the CBC taskforce relied on opinion polls instead of conducting in-depth research from education stakeholders before arriving at key decisions.
Instead, KUPPET urged the government to revert its decision for Grade 7 students to be domiciled in primary schools by bumping them up to secondary schools.
Alluding to this, KUPPET's Secretary-General Akello Misori noted that learning was yet to take place in junior secondary schools due to a lack of teachers.
He called for the government to revert the Grade 7 directive before the end of the holiday.
The union called for the Ministry of Education to hold a crisis meeting involving all education stakeholders in a bid to discuss the way forward.
Various education stakeholders have been urging the government to avert the crisis in JSS in a bid to enhance effective learning.
Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) in November 2022 proposed the government to fund the production of mobile laboratories in JSS; arguing that they were cheap but effective.
In a bid to avert the crisis, the government bowed to pressure and contracted the School Equipment Production Unit (SEPU) for the procurement of mobile labs.
Each mobile lab cost the government Ksh200,000, with each institution requiring a total of eight. This raises the total cost to Ksh1.6 million per institution.
