Lai Chau lacks resources to recruit teachers

After much effort, preparations for the new school year 2024 - 2025 at Dao San Ethnic Boarding Secondary School, Phong Tho District, Lai Chau Province have been basically completed. 28 teachers directly teaching in the classroom have also been present at the school to prepare to welcome more than 700 students who are children of ethnic minorities to return to school.

Teacher Mai Van Tuong, Principal of Dao San Ethnic Boarding Secondary School, said that the difficulties in school facilities and learning materials have been proactively overcome by the school. The only concern of the school at present is the lack of a Fine Arts teacher and is waiting for the superiors to add one. Because this is a specialized subject that requires a specialized teacher, if there is a shortage, the school will have to adjust the teaching schedule accordingly.

“To overcome this situation, the school has proactively submitted a request to the Department of Education and Training and the District People's Committee to request the mobilization or reinforcement of Fine Arts teachers right from the beginning of the school year. In case teachers are not yet available, the school will arrange to teach more hours in other subjects to replace Fine Arts and then when there are Fine Arts teachers, they will arrange to teach them in return,” said Mr. Mai Van Tuong.

Schools in Lai Chau have fully prepared books and school supplies for the new school year.

Like many other schools in Lai Chau, this school year, Ta Leng Primary Boarding School, Tam Duong district, also faces difficulties due to the lack of 2 IT teachers. The solution the school has come up with is to continue using the culture teachers who have been trained in IT since the previous school year to teach. This means that the task of teaching culture to nearly 600 students at the central school and 3 village schools will be undertaken by the remaining 31 teachers.

Teacher Nguyen Dinh Trung, Principal of the school said: “In order to meet the teaching program for students, the school has selected 2 general education teachers to participate in training in IT and has been teaching since the 2023-2024 school year. After 1 year of sending teachers to receive IT certification training, the teachers have tried very hard in the process of performing their teaching tasks. We affirm that compared to teachers specializing in IT, the quality is not equal, but the quality has gradually met the requirements of the new general education program”.

School cleaning work has also been completed.

In the 2024-2025 school year, Lai Chau has 335 school units, more than 5,200 classes and over 150,000 students. To meet the requirements of the new school year, up to now, nearly 11,400 managers, teachers and staff, including nearly 8,600 teachers directly teaching in the classroom, have been present at the units to prepare for the new school year. However, the challenge for the local Education and Training sector this school year is that there is a shortage of 972 teachers compared to the assigned staffing target.

The locality is recruiting more than 500 teachers, but is facing many difficulties in recruiting resources.

Ms. Nghiem Thi Kim Hue, Deputy Director of Lai Chau Department of Education and Training, said that teachers lack concentration at all levels of education, of which more than 330 teachers in specialized subjects such as English, Information Technology, Fine Arts, and Music are urgently needed. To overcome this, Lai Chau Department of Education and Training has flexibly and synchronously implemented solutions, both rearranging the scale of schools and classes, and recruiting and contracting teachers for training, but the difficulty is still the source of recruitment.

“The difficulty of Lai Chau in recruitment is similar to that of many other provinces, which is the lack of recruitment sources. Currently, most provinces across the country are also lacking teachers and have recruitment needs, so recruitment sources are not abundant. For Lai Chau, the geographical location conditions as well as the general economic and social conditions compared to other provinces are also difficult, so attracting recruitment sources to Lai Chau is also more difficult than some other provinces,” said Ms. Nghiem Thi Kim Hue.

This school year, Lai Chau province lacks nearly 1,000 teachers.

According to Ms. Hue, in the 2023-2024 school year, the local recruitment target is 422 positions, but only 192 teachers are recruited, and this school year the recruitment target continues to be 535 positions. To fill the gap in teacher shortage, the Department has also coordinated with the People's Committees of districts and cities to review and develop plans to recruit teachers according to decentralization, but so far there have been very few applications. This situation is a challenge for schools in improving the quality of teaching and learning, especially in implementing the goal of improving the quality of the new 2018 general education program that the whole industry is implementing.

Source: https://vov.vn/xa-hoi/lai-chau-thieu-nguon-tuyen-giao-vien-post1117539.vov