VietNamNet Bridge – As a new academic year approaches, HCM City authorities are worried they will not have enough kindergarten and primary school teachers.

The region lacks more than 2,000 kindergarten teachers.— Photo citinews

Tran Thi Kim Thanh, deputy director of the city's Department of Education and Training, said that the city had around 18,000 teachers and would recruit another 3,248 teachers for all levels for the 2014-2015 academic year, including more than 1,000 for kindergartens and 1,647 for primary schools.

Only 480 kindergarten teachers had been employed thus far, she said.

Currently, there are 960 applicants for junior and secondary school levels, while the city needs another 371.

There have been only 117 applications for kindergartens in districts 1, 9 and Tan Phu, while local schools need to recruit 189 teachers.

The city has more than 43,000 children aged six to 12 months and only four per cent of them go to State-owned pre-schools, many of them children of migrant labourers, who have to deal with poor quality facilities and teachers.

According to Bui Ngoc Au, deputy head of the department's human resources division, the shortage of teachers, especially for kindergarten and primary schools, had existed for many years and this year was no different.

The city needs another several thousand teachers for the two levels every school year, but it has received only a few hundred applications.

The training subsidies offered by the city for teacher training at these levels do not meet demand, Au said.

Like HCM City, provinces and cities in Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta are also facing a shortage of kindergarten and primary school teachers.

The region lacks more than 2,000 kindergarten teachers. However, the number of applicants with teachers' training qualifications from colleges is only about 150.

The shortage of teachers at these two levels will continue to exist and will extend in the coming years to junior and secondary high school levels.

HCM City now has three schools which involve training teachers for kindergartens, the HCM City University of Pedagogy, University of Saigon and HCM City Central College of Pedagogy.

These schools enroll only 800 new students every year.

To deal with the shortage of teachers experienced in previous years, the city had worked with nine universities and colleges to train teachers, Au said.

Additionally, the city has allowed the department to recruit teachers with temporary residential certificates called KT3.

It has also extended the recruitment time instead of the usual deadline of early July.

Another reason for the shortage is the high rate of teacher turnover, as the low salary and hard work involved force many of them to quit, according to a primary teacher in Binh Tan District.

Many teachers shifted from State-owned schools to work for private and foreign-invested schools to have better salaries and working conditions.

VNS/VNN