HCM City seriously lacking teachers for primary schools

The HCM City Education and Training Department (HETD) has announced it needs to recruit 304 teachers for primary schools

VietNamNet Bridge – The HCM City Education and Training Department (HETD) has announced it needs to recruit 304 teachers for primary schools. However, it is foreseeable that the recruitment plan is unfeasible.

Constantly lacking teachers

HETD looked for primary school teachers for the 2010-2011 school year several months ago. However, the number of teachers schools now have still cannot meet the expected demand, so on August 23 the department officially launched a new recruitment campaign.

Sixteen districts in HCM City need to recruit new teachers, but Binh Chanh district lacks teachers the most. The recruitment announcement on the official website of HETD says the district needs 96 more teachers.

An official of the Binh Chanh district’s education sub-department said this school year has 3,000 students more than the previous year, so the district needs 126 more teachers. However, only 30 teachers were recruited in the first recruitment campaign and the district hopes the second campaign will help ease the teacher shortage.

Tan Phu district is not seriously lacking teachers like Binh Chanh, but the district’s education sub-department’s officials are also worried that it cannot enroll enough teachers. Ta Tan, Head of the district’s education sub-department said the district is looking for 28 teachers. Under current regulations, there must be on average 1.2-1.5 teachers for every class, while schools in the district now have on average less than one teacher per class.

In fact, the demand for teachers is very high, but the sub-department has just registered to recruit a moderate number of teachers, because the sub-department knows that there will not be many candidates, according to Tan.

Van Cong Sang, Head of the Personnel Division under the HCM City Education and Training Department, said the demand for primary school teachers in the city is always very high, but the city has never been able to employ enough teachers.

Since the city foresees that there would not be enough primary school teachers to recruit, the city has announced that it will accept secondary and high school teachers to work as primary school teachers, although Sang admitted that secondary and high school teachers cannot meet the requirements for teaching primary school students.

According to Le Ngoc Diep, Head of the Primary Education Division under the HCM City Education and Training Department, it is not difficult to teach information to primary school students. However, teachers need to have teaching skills and a strong awareness of student psychology. Primary school teachers who do not have good teaching methods will inhibit students and badly affect their psychology for their entire lives.

What to do?

Diep said that the city has been seriously lacking primary school teachers in the last few years, since the new Residence Law took effect. People from other localities have been flocking to HCM City, which has led to a higher demand for education in the city. The newly built schools and newly recruited teachers cannot catch up with the increasingly high demand for education.

Meanwhile, experts have pointed out that high school graduates nowadays do not want to register to study at pedagogical universities to become teachers, especially at nursery and primary schools. Primary school teachers have heavy responsibilities, while salaries are not high.

A new graduate, for example, has an income of only 2.2 million dong a month. Therefore, in order to settle the problem of a lack of primary school teachers, the city needs to have a special policy that ensures a reasonable income for primary school teachers.

Source: Nguoi lao dong