Vietnam - Remote areas need reasonable policies to attract teachers

LookAtVietnam - Remote areas have been “laying the red carpet”, inviting teachers to the provinces to work for grammar schools there. However, the number of those coming is always lower than the number of those leaving.

According to the Bac Lieu provincial education and training department, the province lacks 200 teachers for nursery and primary schools this academic year.

Ironically, it is really an awkward situation that the province now has many redundant teachers for secondary schools.

The decreased number of secondary school students has led to the redundancy of 170 teachers in literature, history, geography, biology and chemistry.

Meanwhile, the schools in the locality are seriously lacking teachers in music, arts, and technologies.

The same situation now also can be seen in Ca Mau province, where schools lacking teachers in some subjects, but have hundreds of redundant teachers in other subjects. The number of students in the province has dropped by 8000 in comparison with the previous academic year.

In general, there are hundreds of redundant teachers in the whole province of Ca Mau. However, the remote areas of the province such as Ngoc Hien and Dam Doi are still lacking hundreds of primary school teachers.

Cao Thanh Hong, Chief Secretariat of the Ca Mau provincial Education and Training Department, said that these are all waterways areas with big economic difficulties; therefore, it is very difficult to attract newly graduated teachers. A lot of teachers at the local schools come from the north and the central region, which have left to return to their home villages.

“The districts always seriously lack teachers, because there are more leaving than coming,” he said.

The districts of Dong Hai and Dong Dan, the two remotest areas of the Bac Lieu province, are also crying about the shortage of teachers. Duong Vinh Khy, Deputy Head of the Dong Hai district’s education sub-department, the district needs 40 more teachers, mostly for nursery schools.

In fact, the sub-department anticipated the shortage and began recruiting teachers right when the summer holiday began. However, to date, only 10 teachers have been found.

The redundancy of teachers has caused a big waste to the education sector in Bac Lieu and Ca Mau provinces, while the shortage of teachers has led to the overloading of classes and schools. More seriously, classes cannot be opened in many places, which means that the students in the areas cannot go to school.

Local authorities said that grammar schools are getting bigger, while the number of teachers does not increase accordingly.

Experts believe that in order to settle the problem it is necessary to attract teachers from different localities by offering reasonable treatment policies and financial encouragement, so that teachers can settle down in the provinces and do not want to leave.

However, the treatment policies prove to be not attractive enough to encourage teachers to go working in remote areas. Teachers cannot get adapted to the new living difficult conditions, while they do not get any support in seeking accommodations.

Now in the localities, schools have to apply “flexible” measures to ensure that children can go to school. The children, who cannot go to kindergartens, can attend the “intensive training course” (36 hours) in order to be prepared before going to the first grade.

Meanwhile, at primary and secondary schools, many teachers have been asked to teach the subjects which are not their majors. At other schools, even headmasters and deputy headmasters have to teach students.

However, experts have warned that this should be seen as a temporary solution, and that in the long term, the State and local authorities need to think of the policies that can allow settling the problem to the every root.

Trac Van Day, Deputy Director of the Bac Lieu Education and Training Department, has suggested that it is necessary to provide the training on-the-spot in order to have long term teachers for the local schools.

Source: NLD

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