Insufficient Elementary Teachers

6,700 elementary teachers are expected to be short next year and huge deficiency in employment of elementary teachers examination has occurred. Therefore, lack of elementary teachers in rural areas is likely to continue, despite putting temporary teachers next year.

Following 16 educational offices in the country on 10th, 10,280 applications were filed for employment examination of elementary teachers, which has 8,881 as fixed number, and recorded the lowest competition rate such as 1.16:1.

In Seoul, 1,423 applied for 706 recruitments recording the competition rate as 2:1, and in other regions it is like △ DaeJeon 1.5:1 △ Gwangju 1.26:1 △ Busan 1.2:1 △ Daegue 1.3:1 △ Gyeonggi 1.03:1 △ Gyeongbuk 1.43:1 △ Gyeongnam 1.56:1 △ Chungbuk 1.37:1 △ Jeju 1.1:1, etc.

However, some regions like Jeonnam, Gangwon, Chungnam, etc are facing lack of applicants as usual, therefore, deficiency of elementary teachers in rural areas would become serious.

Jeonnam didn’t even reach its half of fixed numbers such as 90 applied for 200 posts, making competition rate of 0.45:1, and Gangwon 0.89:1, Chungnam 0.60:1. The regions increased the applicants limitation age to 55, where they were facing less applicants, however it lead to criticism that teachers are becoming aged because in Gyeonbuk case, 302 (52.7%) of 573 applicants are above 50-years-old.

Ministry of Education and Human Resources development (MOE) stated that, “ as applicants applied in several regions, actual rate would go down even more” and we are discussing to take further action like announcing for additional recruitments in areas of deficiency”.

inchul@donga.com