Vietnam - New academic year nearing, schools still looking for teachers

Both state owned and private run nursery schools are seriously lacking teachers, which has forced them to hurry to look for teachers, “laying out the red carpet” to welcome teaching staff. 


Le Hong Son, Director of the HCM City Education and Training Department, said that the city needs to recruit 4905 teachers for the 2011-2012 academic year, including 955 teachers for nursery schools, 2362 teachers for primary schools, 1043 for secondary and 456 for high schools.

Retired teachers invited to continue working
In the 2010-2011 academic year, HCM City had to use 1500 babysitters who replaced teachers in non-state nursery schools. The teacher shortage has been predicted to be more serious this year. The new school year will officially begin in two weeks, but a lot of schools still have not got enough lecturers.

The Thien Than Nho Nursery School in district 7 has announced that it needs to recruit three teachers, offering the monthly pay of four million dong. The Khai Minh private run nursery school in district 11 is also seeking two teachers, offering good working conditions, including fixed salaries, bonuses and allowances. Meanwhile, the May Trang nursery school in Tan Phu district needs 10 teachers and babysitters.

According to Chung Thi Bich Phuong, Deputy Head of the Tan Phu district’s education sub-department, after a lot of stages of recruitment, the state owned schools in the district are still lacking seven teachers. The problem is that 27 teachers in the districts have left the schools for other jobs.

Tran Trung Hieu, Head of the education sub-department in district 12, has also expressed his worries that the district still needs seven primary school teachers more for the upcoming school year, while the number of primary school students alone increases by 2000 this year.

Tran Huu Vinh, Head of the Binh Tan district’s education sub-department, said that the teacher shortage is less serious than the previous years, but it still lacks many teachers for primary schools.

According to Vinh, there are about 12,000 children who need to go to nursery schools, while state owned schools can only accept 4000 children, which means that 8000 other children would have to go to private schools or household run classes.

Especially, the number of students going to the first grade this year increases by 3400 over the previous year, which means that the district will have to open 100 more classes for first graders. Also, there are about 400 other students who have been living in the locality as temporary residents.

“In general, the total number of general school students has increased by 5800, and we still lack 394 teachers,” Vinh said.

While waiting for the agencies to employ more teachers, schools have to apply temporary measures by inviting retired teachers to work

Babysitters, healthcare officers--where to find them?

Schools have also complained about the serious shortage of babysitters and healthcare officers. Ta Tan, Head of the Tan Phu district’s education sub-department said that local schools themselves have to hire babysitters who work under the short term contracts signed with the schools. 

This means that the schools, not the state budget, have to pay babysitters. As a result, only the schools, where parents accept to pay more money, dare employ babysitters. If parents do not accept to pay additional money, the schools will not have babysitters.

According to Tan, low salaries plus the low promotion opportunities both make healthcare officers refuse to work for schools. The only solution for now is to send teachers to the short term training courses where they get basic healthcare knowledge to serve students at their schools.

Meanwhile, Phuong said that students now have to study in very bad conditions. The Bong Sen nursery school in Tan Phu district, for example, has been downgrading seriously, but it has not been rebuilt as planned yet. The 500 students of the schools now have to go to the cramped and dank classrooms.

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