Minister of Education and Training gives reasons for teacher shortage

TPO - Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Kim Son pointed out many reasons leading to the shortage of teachers such as limited attraction to the education sector due to low income, slow teacher recruitment, time-consuming staff allocation process...

Recruitment sources for some subjects are not many.

Submitting a petition after the 9th session of the National Assembly, voters of Hung Yen province reflected that the local shortage of teachers still exists, especially teachers of English, IT, music , and fine arts.

Voters believe that if this problem is not resolved quickly, it will cause difficulties in implementing the curriculum and teaching plan. Therefore, voters recommend that the Ministry of Education and Training have fundamental solutions to overcome this situation.

Responding to voters' petitions, Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Kim Son said that recently, the Ministry has actively coordinated with the Ministry of Home Affairs to advise the Government to report to the Central Executive Committee to supplement 65,980 teacher positions for the 2022-2026 period.

According to the Minister, in the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, the country recruited more than 40,000 teachers. However, the number of students in the past two school years has continuously increased, leading to an increase in the number of classes and the number of teachers needed. In the 2023-2024 school year, the number of teachers needed increased by 13,676 teachers; and in the 2024-2025 school year, the number of teachers needed increased by 22,000 teachers, leading to a shortage of teachers in many localities.

In addition, the shortage of teachers has several causes such as: the attraction to the education sector is still limited due to low income, at the same time the source of recruitment for some subjects such as information technology, foreign languages, and arts is not much because students studying these majors have many other career options with higher incomes than being a teacher after graduation.

On the other hand, the head of the education and training sector said that recruiting teachers for these subjects is also difficult when there is little demand from students to choose, especially for art subjects that require talent.

In addition, teacher recruitment is slow because the process of allocating staff and recruiting teachers in localities takes a long time. Another reason pointed out is that some localities do not recruit all assigned staff but reserve quotas to streamline staff.

No mechanical reduction in the number of assigned teachers

Faced with the above situation, Mr. Nguyen Kim Son said that the Ministry continues to direct teacher training institutions to open major codes and organize teacher training according to local needs, ensuring a source of teacher recruitment for localities, especially for new subjects and special subjects.

The Ministry also directs, inspects, and urges localities to recruit teachers to ensure sufficient staff assigned by competent authorities according to Directive 32/2023 of the Prime Minister on continuing to promote fundamental and comprehensive innovation of general education.

The Ministry will continue to advise the Prime Minister to issue official dispatches for localities to continue recruiting teachers when arranging the apparatus to implement two-level local government; direct localities to continue reviewing and arranging the network of schools and classrooms; pilot the autonomy mechanism for public preschool and general education institutions, promote the socialization of education, etc.

To overcome the local surplus and shortage of teachers, the Ministry of Home Affairs has issued an official dispatch requesting the People's Committees of provinces and cities to effectively manage and use the assigned number of teacher positions in accordance with regulations, with reasonable decentralization between local authorities at all levels; immediately recruit teachers at general schools and kindergartens within the total assigned number of positions...

Source: https://tienphong.vn/bo-truong-giao-duc-va-dao-tao-neu-ly-do-thieu-giao-vien-post1785837.tpo