Teachers’ group says hiring 10,000 teachers not enough

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The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) said hiring 10,000 teachers won’t be enough to ease the shortage of teachers.

We need to hire 147,000 new teachers to be able to lower the class size to 35,

ACT deputy secretary general Dana Beltran said in a statement on Tuesday, September 27.

Its cost of P54 billion is a worthy investment for our youth’s and nation’s future. It is perfectly doable only if the national government would straighten up its priorities and rid the 2023 proposed budget of hefty allocations to questionable agency-hosted pork barrel funds, dubious confidential and intelligence funds, and onerous debt payments,

she added.

Earlier in September, the Department of Education (DepEd) announced that it is planning to hire 10,000 teachers.

Hiring 10,000 new teachers can only accommodate these new learners, and at a large class size of 55 students at that. The figures could be worse as yearly, many teachers exit the service to retire or seek better-paying jobs. Now, how can 10,000 new teaching positions be of any help in alleviating the teacher shortage?

Beltran said.

There is nothing new in creating 10,000 new teaching positions as it has been the baseline yearly allocation of the national government for several years already. This is in no way a plan to reduce the current class size or ease teachers’ workload to enable education recovery or improve the quality of education,

she further explained.

She stressed that to salvage the country’s education system from crisis, the education budget must be doubled to solve problems in education.

The ACT has been appealing to the government to double DepEd’s budget for 2023.