Every August is the time when localities rush to complete the recruitment of teachers and staff for the new school year. This year, the recruitment work has improved a lot, but it still cannot completely solve the problem of teacher shortage in schools.

Red eyes looking for gifted teachers

Last weekend, the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training announced the list of successful candidates for the 2024-2025 school year. This year's recruitment results show that 13/15 subjects have enough teachers to meet recruitment needs, including many subjects with very high competition rates such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc. This is a more positive result than previous school years because there is no longer a shortage of teachers in many subjects.

However, the two subjects that did not have enough teachers this school year were both gifted subjects. Of which, Music had 8 successful candidates out of 9 recruitment needs, Fine Arts had 3 successful candidates out of 7 recruitment needs. Previously, in the application review round, Music and Fine Arts were the two subjects with the lowest number of applications among the subjects with 13 applications for Music and 5 applications for Fine Arts.

Mr. Tong Phuoc Loc, Head of the Department of Organization and Personnel (Department of Education and Training of Ho Chi Minh City) said that the shortage of teachers for gifted subjects is not only happening at high school level but also at two other levels: primary and secondary school. In addition to the two subjects of Music and Fine Arts, primary and secondary schools also lack teachers for other specific subjects such as English, Information Technology, and Physical Education.

Mr. Pham Dang Khoa, Head of the Department of Education and Training of District 3 (HCMC), said that one of the reasons for the shortage of teachers despite recruiting every year is that the recruitment process is currently carried out independently by localities, so there is a situation where a candidate applies to many places. When the recruitment results are available, the candidate does not come to take up the position because he was recruited at the same time elsewhere and has chosen a better working environment. This reality forces districts to organize recruitment multiple times in the same school year or consider the option of "sharing" teachers between schools.

Representatives of many Departments of Education and Training in Ho Chi Minh City said that the current income of teachers in public schools is not enough to retain good teachers. Many young teachers, after working for a period of time in public schools, have moved to the non-public sector or private training centers because of better income. This is a problem that the education sector has struggled to find a solution for many years because it is related to many other areas such as finance, welfare policies, etc.

Expanding decentralization to schools

The new point of recruitment for the 2024-2025 school year is that the education sector has two more job positions recruited for the first time: academic staff and student psychological counselor. At the high school level, the recruitment results in early August showed that 10 candidates were selected for the academic staff position out of a total of 12 recruitment needs. The position of student psychological counselor has not been recruited because schools are using part-time staff. For many other job positions, recruitment has not met the actual requirements of schools.

For example, the new IT staff position has 5 successful candidates out of 14 recruitment needs; the accounting staff has 4 successful candidates out of 6 recruitment needs; the equipment and laboratory staff has 7 successful candidates out of 12 recruitment needs; the clerical staff has 1 successful candidate out of 4 recruitment needs... At preschool, primary and secondary school levels, the annual recruitment needs for medical, IT and library staff are all very large, but localities lack recruitment sources.

To solve the above difficulties, in the 2024-2025 school year, the Department of Education and Training of Ho Chi Minh City will expand the decentralization of recruitment to 29 public service units in the city. Chief of Office of the Department of Education and Training of Ho Chi Minh City Ho Tan Minh said that the expansion of decentralization of recruitment is to help schools be more proactive in recruiting teachers and staff, thereby enhancing the responsibility of leaders and ensuring the effectiveness of operations at the unit.

With the same approach, District 1 (HCMC) is the first locality to announce that it will pilot the decentralization of teacher recruitment for schools, initially implementing it with schools following advanced models and international integration. Along with the decentralization of recruitment, the management agency continues to review, regularly inspect and evaluate to help the implementation go in the right direction, achieve real effectiveness, and contribute to improving the quality of education at the units.

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