VietNamNet Bridge – HCM City needs 3,049 teachers in the 2012-2013 academic year, but it only could find 2,000.

According to the HCM City Education and Training Department, only 580 teachers were found for nursery schools, while it needed 751. As for the primary education, only 425 teachers were recruited, far below from meeting the demand of 1,080 teachers.

Secondary school teachers recruited 459 teachers out of the 850 needed. Other education levels have also found fewer teachers than expected.

The main problem, according to schools, was that the quality of teachers was not good enough to take the job of teaching. Truong Thi Viet Lien, a senior official of the HCM City education department, has noted that a lot of pedagogical school graduates feel embarrassed in the class, cannot organize classes.

Especially, they seriously lack communication skills and many of them do not like the job of teaching. Lien said that some teachers decided to give up the job of teaching just after two months of probation. As a result, the nursery schools in the city still lacks 1,258 teachers.

It is expected that by 2015, the city’s education sector would need 136,122 officers and teachers, including 44,311 for pre-school education, 33,876 for primary schools, 33, 277 for secondary schools, and 16,068 for high schools. Besides, the city would need 6590 teachers for continuation education centers.

Thai Quoc Tuan, Deputy Head of the Secondary Education Division of the HCM City education department, also has noted that though finishing pedagogical schools, a lot of teachers are weak at writing lesson plans, giving lessons and lack experience in class management.

According to Le Ngoc Diep, Head of the primary education division, 75 percent of people say they are satisfactory about primary school teachers, which shows the great achievements of pedagogical schools. However, he thinks that the schools need to upgrade the training and organize the training in accordance with the standards.

“It’s the right time for HCM City to have a practice pedagogical school,” Diep said.

“It’s quite unreasonable that a big city like HCM City, with more than 500,000 primary school students and two big pedagogical universities, still does not have an experimental school,” he added.

Dr. Nguyen Kim Hong, Deputy Headmaster of the HCM City Pedagogical University, argues that it is not a surprise that new pedagogical school graduates have weak qualifications.

In other countries, after finishing universities, graduates would have one more year of training. Then they would be sent to experimental school to practice their skills. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, there is no such a school.

“If we have a pedagogical experimental school, we would send students to the school for internship regularly. If so, no need to worry about the quality of graduates,” Hong said.

Deputy President of the HCM City University of Technical Education--Do Van Dung, believes that the key problem lies in the training curriculums.

Dung has noted that there has been no close cooperation between the trainers (pedagogical schools) and employers (general schools), which has led to the production of low qualification teachers.

HCM City now has 53,000 lecturers and teachers working for the schools at different education levels. The city is considering establishing a council of presidents of pedagogical schools.

Le Huyen