To resolve the teacher shortage in the country’s public schools, a group on Wednesday, March 22, urged the Department of Education (DepEd) to hire 30,000 new teachers yearly in the next five years. Following the pronouncement of Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte that the agency plans to hire new teachers every year, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines called for the hiring of 30,000 new teachers each year up to 2028 to resolve the teacher shortage. READ: [https://mb.com.ph/2023/3/21/dep-ed-to-strengthen-ph-education-sector-by-hiring-training-teachers](https://mb.com.ph/2023/3/21/dep-ed-to-strengthen-ph-education-sector-by-hiring-training-teachers) With this, ACT said that class sizes can be decreased to 35 students each which would result in improvement in the quality of education in the country. ACT Chairperson Vladimer Quetua noted that currently, the country’s public schools are “short of 147,000 teachers to decisively reduce the class size to 35 students.” This shortage, he explained, also affects the learning process because teachers cannot teach effectively and are unable to monitor the progress of each of our learners. “Approximately, we need to hire 25,000 new teachers yearly until 2028 to eradicate the shortage, and an additional 5,000 new teachers to cover the yearly increase in enrolment, which totals to a requirement of 30,000 new teachers yearly,” Quetua said.

Nothing new

Meanwhile, ACT pointed out that there is “nothing new” with the program of hiring new teachers every year as the national budgets in the past had already contained the creation of 5,000 new teaching items each year. While new teachers are hired every year, Quetua noted that these were only enough to provide for new teachers for the increase in the learner population. The number of newly-hired teachers is not enough to cut down the class size to improve education quality. “The important question is, ‘how many?’” he asked. Quetua said that around P14 billion will be needed to hire 30,000 new teachers in a year based on the data from the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) noting that the personnel services cost of an entry-level teacher is P465,760 annually. “We are sure the people’s taxes can support this if only the government would give due premium to education,” Quetua said.

Resolve issues

Apart from the provision of sufficient funding, ACT also urged DepEd to “resolve the bureaucratic red tape” that hinders the speedy hiring of teachers. ACT said that DepEd “could not even fill up all its vacant teaching items” while thousands of applicants have been deemed qualified based on its Registry of Qualified Applicants. “Teacher shortage is at the core of the learning crisis,” Quetua said. Due to this, he explained that regular classes, especially in urban areas, number 50 learners or more each, while every teacher is tasked to teach a minimum of six classes and monitor the progress of a total of 300 students each school year. On top of this, Quetua said that teachers are also “saddled” with various administrative duties and numerous paperwork. “How can we expect to improve the quality of teaching in this scenario?” he lamented.