VietNamNet Bridge – Education and training always comes high on the list of priority sectors to be developed. However, teachers are among the lowest income earners.

Bui Manh Nhi, Director of the Ministry of Education and Training’s Department of Organization and Personnel, has affirmed that the current problem will be settled, and that in the future, teachers will be paid in accordance with their capacity.

According to Nhi, there are some 1.2 million teachers throughout the country, including 1,134,000 teachers working for state owned schools – the staff of civil servants that is bigger than any other staffs.

The teachers’ incomes, after a lot of wage reforms, remain modest. A nursery school entry teacher can get VND2.6 million a month. After ten years of working, his salary would be VND4 million. A high school teacher receives VND3.2 million in the first years of working and VND5 million when he has 10-years service length.

The average pay to Vietnamese university lecturers is among the lowest in the world, according to Pham Hiep, a postgraduate in Taiwan, who came to the conclusion after considering a newly released report by Russian and US researchers about the income of state owned schools’ lecturers in some countries.

The salaries paid to Vietnamese university lecturers are only higher than China, Russia and Armenia, while far below Malaysia, a regional country, or India.

The figures in the reports only showed the average pay to Chinese lecturers. Meanwhile, the salaries paid to the lecturers of the leading universities are much higher, on a par with the US or Canada.

Ho Thieu Hung, former Director of the HCM City Education and Training, said he fears that the low salaries for teachers would lead to the low qualification of the teaching staff in 10 or 15 years.

“Excellent high school students nowadays don’t want to study further to become teachers,” Hung noted.

Former Vice President Nguyen Thi Binh once cited a report as saying that 40 percent of teachers regretted their decision to become teachers, because of the low incomes.

Since the salaries they get from the state are not high enough to cover their basic needs, they have to take extra jobs to get more money.

According to Hung, the average salary for teachers should be as high as VND10 million to be sure that teachers can absolutely devote themselves to the teaching and they don’t have to take extra jobs for money.

“We have suggested that teachers’ salary ranks the highest in the payroll for state employees. We have also proposed to pay teachers in accordance with their capacity,” Nhi said.

“If the Communist Party and the State decide that education is the top national policy, teachers need to be treated in a way to deserve this,” he continued.

However, Nhi said, the problems of the education sector cannot be settled overnight. “Imagine that every teacher receives VND100,000 more every month, and the state would have to pay VND131 million, a very big figure in the current conditions,” he said.

However, Nhi believes that the Ministry of Education and Training needs to come forward and demand the legitimate interests for teachers.

Thanh Mai