Surplus of teachers in Nghe An: Provincial-level excellent teachers must go to school to take care of children

(Baonghean) - The Ministry of Education and Training has issued document 288/HDLN on implementing policies for preschool teachers to overcome the surplus of teachers in primary and secondary schools. However, this solution is facing controversy and is at risk of "mistakes on top of mistakes".

From reviewing surplus teachers

To overcome the consequences caused by the surplus of teachers, on October 28, 2013, the Provincial People's Committee issued Directive No. 30/CT-UBND on continuing to rectify the situation of labor contracts in agencies and units.

It clearly states that if the agency or unit still has contract quotas approved by the Provincial People's Committee and the individual under contract meets the conditions, standards, and correct structure, the head of the agency or unit will re-sign the labor contract according to regulations.

On the contrary, if the unit has no need, no source of income; the contract does not match the quantity and structure approved by the Provincial People's Committee, the contract will be liquidated. At the same time, heads of agencies and units are strictly prohibited from signing labor contracts without the Provincial People's Committee's approval of the structure, quantity, and position.

Mr. Le Dinh Ly - Deputy Director of the Department of Home Affairs said: "Because many workers have been teaching for too long, most of them up to 10 - 15 years, and the positions these teachers hold are difficult to replace due to their qualifications and subject structure, some localities still re-sign every year.

However, the signing is mainly in the form of seasonal, short-term contracts, and the Department of Home Affairs has not received any documents from any district requesting to sign additional labor contracts." According to Mr. Ly, most of these teachers have been under contracts for many years, so the districts do not "have the heart" to terminate them.

Class hours of students at Thanh Khai Secondary School (Thanh Chuong).

The problem of surplus has not been resolved resolutely and vigorously, partly because the Department of Education and Training still considers the problem of surplus to be the responsibility of the localities, so there is no general solution. For a long time, this problem was mainly left to the localities to "swim alone", to solve it themselves in the "everyone does it for themselves" manner.

During the process of urging and monitoring, some related sectors, mainly the Education sector, have not managed and monitored closely, leading to violations on top of violations. Most recently, on August 27, 2015, a few months before retiring, Mr. Nguyen Tien Loi - Chairman of Yen Thanh District People's Committee signed the "Notice on allowing teacher contracts for the 2015 - 2016 school year" for 55 contract teachers. This violation was inspected by the inter-department and required to be liquidated on May 31, 2016.

Mr. Tran Xuan Tinh - Head of the Department of Education and Training of Yen Thanh district said: "Currently, there are still 70 surplus primary school teachers in the area, of which 136 are contract teachers; there are 104 surplus secondary school teachers, but there are 118 contract teachers. The sector has advised the locality that in addition to transfers, it is necessary to consider the plan to build a forecasting project to have a mechanism to recruit truly capable teachers."

Use this mistake to correct that mistake

To support preschool teachers and lunch policies for preschool children, the Ministry of Education and Training, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Home Affairs issued Joint Circular No. 09/2013/TTLT-BGDĐT-BTC-BNV dated March 11, 2013. Accordingly, in addition to the support policies for children stipulated in this Circular, the subjects of support are preschool teachers who meet the standards of professional titles and occupations working under labor contracts (within the norms prescribed by competent authorities) at preschool facilities.

These subjects are entitled to receive salary according to the professional salary scale and accompanying allowances; receive regular salary increases and pay and receive unemployment insurance.

Physical education class of students at Thanh Khai Secondary School (Thanh Chuong).

In Nghe An, Circular 09, when put into practice, was applied in a "flexible" way. That is, issuing Document 288/HDLN-SGD&ĐT-SNV-STC on implementing policies for contract teachers in public kindergartens. According to the explanation of the departments and branches related to the issuance of this document, this is a way to apply Circular 09 to reduce surplus teachers, or in other words, legalize the number of surplus teachers from primary and secondary schools.

Therefore, in Instruction 288, priority will be given to teachers with long-term contracts at public schools, contract teachers within the quota approved by the Provincial People's Committee and recruited by the District People's Committee in accordance with the labor contract process. Also according to Instruction 288, the priority recruitment scope is the number of surplus contract teachers at secondary and primary levels after being retrained, meeting the requirements of the preschool education sector.

In accordance with Instruction 288, in the 2015-2016 school year, 1,600 targets were assigned to localities to recruit preschool teachers (in the form of recruiting primary and secondary school teachers). However, because teachers did not have the required preschool qualifications, some districts sent teachers to accelerated courses to obtain "short-term certificates" (1 month) even though this was not in accordance with the regulations for recruiting preschool teachers.

In the 2015-2016 school year, the People's Committee of Anh Son district organized a contract recruitment of 63 teachers to supplement public kindergartens (at that time, the district had 80 qualified and above-standard kindergarten teachers under district and school contracts); implemented in the spirit of Instruction 288 and the result was 63 teachers were recruited, including: only 40 teachers met the standards of kindergarten teachers (1 intermediate kindergarten teacher, 9 teachers of preschool teacher training college; 30 teachers of preschool teacher training university); the remaining 23 teachers had not been trained.

The remaining 40 teachers under contract with the district and kindergartens must "give way" for 23 surplus teachers from secondary and primary schools to transfer down. This is an inconvenience for the new receiving units as the qualified teachers are not entitled to the policy of Circular 09, while the teachers who have not trained in preschools or have had patchy training are entitled to support policies.

Also in the 2015-2016 school year, Quynh Luu district "circumvented the law" to implement the conversion by not allowing teachers to teach without a qualified degree, but still enjoying the regime according to Circular 09. However, this is contrary to the provisions of Circular 09, because according to the regulations, this policy only supports teachers who are teaching and have a standard degree.

In the 2016-2017 school year, the Education sector continues to direct the recruitment of 900 more preschool teachers and still plans to take from 1,500 surplus teachers at the secondary and primary levels (for districts with surplus teachers). As for the districts, learning from the experience of last year, they sent teachers to intermediate training. However, the quality is still a concern.

Furthermore, many of the surplus teachers have university degrees, and many of them were excellent teachers at secondary and primary levels but now have to undergo accelerated vocational training. This has met with mixed reactions from those who have been transferred.

Regarding this issue, Mr. Nguyen Tat Tay - Head of the Department of Education and Training of Do Luong district said: "We know that this is an open door for long-term contract teachers who are redundant from secondary and primary schools, but in reality, most of these teachers are old, with contracts of up to 10 - 15 years. They have also been transferred to difficult areas, now motivating them to retrain and teach preschool is a difficult problem to solve."

Teachers at Quan Hanh town primary school guide students in reading.

According to Mr. Nguyen Tat Tay, among the 93 primary school teachers and 126 secondary school teachers in surplus in Do Luong district, more than half do not want to leave. Because most of the teachers are old, changing to a highly specialized job such as raising children is very difficult (although they will be trained for 10 months in preschool education).

Secondly, for secondary school teachers who teach Literature and Math, their positions in the school have been confirmed, giving up their passion and strengths to become a preschool teacher is a "difficult to adapt" change. As in the case of teacher Nguyen Thi Nguyet, a teacher at Doi Cung Secondary School, a Literature teacher with more than 10 years of experience, good teaching, and prestige, but now, despite regret, the school still has to persuade her to go to preschool to solve the problem of surplus.

Similarly, in Yen Thanh district, among 75 primary and secondary school teachers transferred to preschools, there are 10 cases of excellent teachers at the provincial level, who are qualified, influential and influential among the teaching staff and students. The fact that excellent teachers at the provincial level must be retrained to teach preschools is also a "hot hand, ear-catching" solution and the district's Education Department is "heartbroken" when seeing the team of excellent teachers not teaching in accordance with their expertise but being transferred to "childcare".

Another disadvantage is that with such a large number of surplus teachers transferred to preschools, generations of students who have been properly trained in universities and colleges in preschool education will not have the opportunity to be recruited (according to the proposed number of retraining to teach preschool education in the 2016-2017 school year, it is 900, but the missing number is 896).

Accordingly, in the next 10-20 years, preschool children will not be taught and cared for by qualified teachers. And the vicious cycle of unemployment, staff quality, teaching quality, input expansion, and output contraction will continue./.

PV Group