A lobby calling itself Concerned Teachers of Kenya has asked the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to scrap a recruitment score sheet it argues discriminates against humanities graduates.
In a petition dated August 26 2025 and delivered to TSC chief executive Nancy Macharia, the teachers say the current template gives science applicants a huge leg-up.
Under the matrix, science subjects attract 65 marks, technical and creative arts 40, languages 25 and humanities just 25.
“This unfair weighting ensured that fresh science graduates of 2023/2024 were absorbed almost immediately, while many humanities and language teachers who had graduated as early as 2015/2016 had not secured employment,” the petition reads.
The lobby argues that the disparity violates the equality provisions of Kenya’s 2010 Constitution and the Basic Education Act of 2016. It warns that repeating the formula risks “creating a generation of permanently jobless humanities teachers.”
Thousands of trained teachers remain unemployed even as schools complain of staff shortages. English and literature teachers are in short supply, yet many qualified graduates in those subjects say they are overlooked.
The petitioners note that some secondary schools have had to assign science teachers to handle English or literature classes, something they say has dented the rollout of the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC).
“Current reports show that in many counties, science teachers are being forced to teach languages they were never trained for, lowering the quality of education and undermining CBC implementation,” the group says.
What the teachers want:
1. Review the score sheet and redistribute marks more evenly across subjects.
2. Set aside a quota for humanities graduates who have waited the longest for placement.
3. Ensure teachers are deployed only in the subjects they trained for. “Education thrives when all disciplines are valued equally. No teacher should be made to feel lesser or disposable,” the petition states.
Next steps
The document, stamped by the Concerned Teachers of Kenya, asks the commission to respond within 30 days. TSC had not issued a public reaction by press time, but officials have previously defended subject-weighted recruitment as a way to plug long-standing science gaps in public schools.
Kenya has roughly 350,000 registered teachers competing for about 250,000 positions on the government payroll, according to recent TSC data. The commission hired 20,000 interns in July and has advertised a further 4,000 posts, most earmarked for science and mathematics.
Whether the latest petition shifts that balance now rests with the commission’s board, even as the new academic term begins on August 28.
