Judicial authority: Education minister should withdraw decision rejecting 14,000 teachers

With few teachers and a freeze on public sector hiring, crowded classrooms have compromised learning at government schools across the country for years.

The government launched a scheme in 2022 to make an exceptional 30,000 hires for kindergarten and assistant primary school teachers.

Tens of thousands of hopefuls applied. They passed through stages including written tests, a medical examination, an unconventional and uncomfortable series of fitness tests, including running, push-ups and abdominal exercises, and finally, a verbal examination at the Military Academy.

Though they passed the first phases, 14,000 teachers found they were rejected at the final stage.

One hundred and six of those teachers are challenging the rejection in cases filed at the administrative court.

As part of the lawsuit, a judicial body reviewed the hiring process, producing over a hundred reports in March, of which Mada Masr has reviewed several.

In the reports, the judicial body recommends that the teachers’ rejections should be overturned. The Education Ministry, the Central Agency for Organization and Administration and the various governorates declined to specify the reasons for the 14,000 teachers’ rejection.

The State Commissioners Authority — a judicial body competent to offer expert opinions and recommendations on disputes involving government bodies — spent a month requesting that officials running the hiring scheme grant them access to details on the decision-making process for hires, according to Aziza al-Taweel, a lawyer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and one of the 106 teachers' defense lawyers who spoke to Mada Masr about the review’s outcome.

The authority also requested that the officials submit to the authority the individual files of those rejected, Taweel said, noting that the requests were made to support the authority in understanding why people were rejected during the medical, physical fitness and verbal tests conducted at the Military Academy.

However, officials from the relevant entities failed to provide the requested documentation, according to Taweel.

In several State Commissioners Authority reports, the authority outlines the career ladder for teachers and the hiring procedure as stipulated in the education law.

The reports note the hiring stages, including exams under the Central Agency for Organization and Administration within one or more governorates, a final ranking of exam results, and references to qualifications, seniority in graduation and age in the case of tied exam results. Candidates for the position are also obligated by law to pass tests set by the education minister, the authority notes.

The State Commissioners Authority said in its reports that the rejected contestants had passed all required tests and training courses.

The reports were presented to the administrative court for a Tuesday session in the 106 teachers’ cases, which was ultimately postponed.

After the rejection decision was published in a 2023 decree by the education minister, hundreds of teachers staged a sit-in outside the Education Ministry in the New Administrative Capital to protest the unfair scheme.

Security forces forcibly dispersed the sit-in and arrested several of them.