All Grade 7 books to be available in schools by end of March

Grade Seven students in over 2,000 Junior Secondary Schools (JSS) in the Central region will have all 12 textbooks before the end of March, the region’s Director of Education Sabina Aroni has said.

She said a majority of the schools had already received books for five core learning areas with the remaining seven expected to be delivered in two weeks.

“We are working with different distributors each dealing with a county. Books for five learning areas (subjects) have already been released to both public and private junior secondary schools across the central region and the other seven will be distributed before the end of March,” she said.

Aroni, who was speaking at Gikanja School during a parents’ sensitization forum on the Competency-Based Curriculum, said the Teachers Service Commission was deploying JSS tutors based on the number of streams hosted by each school.

In Nyeri, 75 JSS tutors were deployed against a total of 344 public junior secondary schools registered in the county.

To cover the shortfall, Aroni challenged school heads to make use of the experienced teachers already working in the school to ease the workload for the newly recruited JSS teacher as they wait for TSC to hire and deploy additional tutors for JSS.

“Since the school already has experienced teachers who have been teaching standard seven and eight pupils, we are encouraging the heads to assign them to JSS so as to complement these JSS teachers,” she said.

Aroni who sought to reassure parents that the government had put in place strategies to resolve any emerging issues affecting the full implementation of the new curriculum.