The plan to hire 10,000 teachers for the next school year will neither improve the quality of education nor enable education recovery in the country, Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) said on Tuesday, Sept. 27.
The Department of Education (DepEd), on Sunday, Sept. 25, aired its plan to hire around 10,000 teachers for the school year 2023-2024 to help resolve the shortage of teachers in the Philippines.
This plan, however, was slammed by teachers’ group ACT, saying that “there is nothing new” in this scheme as it has already been the “baseline yearly allocation” of the national government for several years.
“There is nothing new in creating 10,000 new teaching positions. This is no way a plan to reduce the current class size or ease teachers’ workload,” the group reiterated.
For ACT Deputy Secretary Dana Janella Beltran, DepEd needs to hire 147,000 new teachers to be able to lower the class size into an ideal number of 35.
“Having sufficient number of teachers and reducing their workload to humane levels are central to addressing the current learning crisis. We simply cannot do it if our teachers handle six, seven, eight or more classes of 50 students each,” said Beltran.