Surplus teachers to be retrained

 

Hanoi (VNA) – The Ministry of Education and Training is setting up a programme to retrain surplus teachers in secondary and high schools, to deal with current shortages in kindergartens.

Under the plan, about 40,000 teachers will be retrained to work in kindergartens.

According to the ministry, Vietnamese education is facing an excess of teachers in secondary and high schools, while pre-schools lack staff.

The ministry’s statistics have recently shown an excess of over 40,000 secondary and high school teachers across the country, while pre-schools lacked more than 30,000 teachers.

To address this situation, some localities have transferred redundant teachers to teach in preschools. However, these teachers are facing difficulties due to differences in teaching between schools.

The most common difficulty was that many secondary and high school teachers lacked teaching skills for preschool-age children, said Nguyen Thi Van, a secondary school teacher who was assigned to teach in a kindergarten in the central province of Nghe An.

“Although we have knowledge, we lack teaching skills for preschool. Teaching in kindergarten is very different to teaching in secondary and high schools, and it requires pedagogical skills and talent. Teaching in kindergartens will become torture if teachers do not have talent,” Van told vietnamnet online newspaper.

In the central province of Thanh Hoa, more than 100 redundant secondary school teachers in Thach Thanh district were switched to teach in primary and preschools. However, more than 40 teachers were instructed to do other work, instead of teaching, the newspaper reported.

Discussing the situation at a recent conference, the Education and Training Minister Phung Xuan Nha said, at present, using redundant teachers to fill the shortage in preschools is a temporary solution, but it poses risks for the quality of teaching in kindergartens.

According to the minister, unqualified teachers in preschools are one of the main causes behind violence in some classrooms.

To deal with this problem, the ministry has assigned teacher training colleges to set up a programme to retrain redundant teachers to teach in preschools which lack teachers, the minister said.

This programme will be designed scientifically to improve the quality of teachers and will be used across the country, he said.

Teachers could learn in their locality or through online programmes to reduce overloading on teacher training colleges, Nha said.

The programme will also be flexible for teachers who specialise in math, English, literature, science, history, said Prof Nguyen Van Minh, rector of Hanoi Teachers Training University, which was assigned to set up the programme.

The ministry will work with educational departments and localities to develop exact statistics on the number of surplus teachers, Minh said.

Under the plan, the programme will be implemented in February, he added.-VNA