With no new hires, teacher shortfall widens in government schools

The number of teachers in Egypt’s public school system has decreased over the last fiscal year, at both government schools and at schools run by Al-Azhar, according to a release from the state statistics agency to mark the occasion of World Teachers’ Day.

The decrease is just the latest indicator of an atrophying student-teacher ratio in the free education system.

At the same time as the student population is growing, the size of the teaching workforce dwindles year by year as older staff retire and are not replenished as a government freeze on new permanent contracts for teachers in the public sector is in its seventeenth consecutive year.

The graph below, which reflects figures published Monday by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics(CAPMAS), shows the real number of teachers in both branches of the public education system — Education Ministry schools and schools exclusively for Muslim students run by Al-Azhar — in fiscal year 2019/20 as compared to the previous year, showing that the size of the teaching workforce dropped by around 18,000 teachers.

Though slight at first glance, Abdel Hafiz Tayel, director of the Egyptian Center for the Right to Education told Mada Masr that the impact of the decrease is redoubled by the annual increase in the number of students.

The following figure shows the student-teacher ratios in Education Ministry and Al-Azhar schools, based on the CAPMAS data.

As shown, the student-teacher ratio in the primary, preparatory and secondary stages at Education Ministry schools is much higher than the internationally accepted standard of 12 students per teacher, Tayel said.

The Al-Azhar education system enjoys a much better student-to-teacher ratio across the board, which Tayel says is because Al-Azhar hires teachers more extensively than the Education Ministry.

Public schools under the Education Ministry face a major deficit in teaching staff, with a shortfall of around 259,000 teachers, according to statistics from late 2020, the Teachers Syndicate Secretary-General Mohamed Abdullah told the press on Monday.

The shortage, spurred by the lack of new hires to cover for the thousands of teachers who have reached retirement age, has coincided with annual increases in the number of students, according to Abdullah.

However, Tayel said that the teacher deficit is a longstanding issue. In the 1990s, he said, the government decided to stop hiring graduates from university education faculties to public schools. Instead, only top graduates were hired until 2004, when, according to Tayel, “even this approach was abandoned” and the government began instead to offer temporary contracts, or to hire assistant teachers for an initial two years, after which they could test to qualify fully as teachers.

Tayel said the Education Ministry relied heavily on the different types of temporary contracts, to the point that “UNESCO observed in 2008 that no more than 4.5 percent of staff under the age of 35 in Egypt’s public education system were hired on a permanent basis.”

There are now droves of graduates from faculties of education and other faculties that qualify graduates to pursue teaching, he said, some of whom had to accept temporary contracts worth no more than LE105 per month in the hope of permanent appointment, noting that many teach privately on the side to compensate for how low their salaries are. The minimum wage in Egypt’s public sector is LE2,400 per month. Otherwise, said Tayel, they turn to the private sector.

Tayel noted that the decrease in the number of teaching staff shown in the CAPMAS release reflects the Education Ministry’s decision last fiscal year to suspend even its temporary hiring measures.

A measure to plug the deficit in staff last year was also short-lived: 36,000 teachers were hired through a “competition” system, though the Education Ministry ultimately terminated all the contracts after just one semester

Existing teaching staff employed by the Education Ministry were also uprooted en masse in 2019, when minister Tarek Shawky fired 1,070 teachers for “adopting extremist ideas.”

In the most recent attempt to address the shortfall, a new initiative this academic year will see teachers work on a “voluntary” basis for a per-class fee of LE20. With a maximum number of 24 available classes per week for 11 months per year at most, “so as not to burden the ministry’s budget,” the total possible wage through the new system would be LE1,920 per month, below the public sector minimum wage. In a similar way to zero-hours or platform employment models, the scheme would apparently fail to guarantee participants a minimum number of classes.

In TV comments addressing the teacher shortage last week, Shawky pointed out that all administrative bodies are currently barred from making new hires, a measure that was introduced in all government bodies in response to the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic to tighten the state budget, but acknowledged that, either way, the Education Ministry doesn’t currently have the budget for new teaching staff.

The Education Ministry’s budget consistently falls below the constitutional requirement that at least six percent of Gross National Income be spent on education each year.