REGULAR teaching, least to speak of quality education in the government and private schools and colleges, is facing setback due to shortages of teachers for many years passed. A news report on Thursday said that vacancies at the country’s Primary and Secondary schools and colleges remained unfulfilled to be a source of headache for many educational institutions for at least about five years now. The government is responsible for failing to recruit teachers to over 1.05 lakh vacancies. And it is seriously affecting education. If this disastrous scarcity of teachers continues in absence of recruitment it may eventually threaten to undermine government’s efforts to ensure universal access to primary education and quality education in all strata of educations in Bangladesh.
Report said that Primary, Secondary schools and Colleges across the country have 4.87 lakh teachers while they should have 5.92 lakh teachers. It also said that 60,000 vacancies exist at government primary, 40,000 at non-government secondary schools and intermediate colleges, 3,475 vacancies at government colleges and 2,250 vacancies at government run secondary schools. This is very alarming for ensuring quality education in Bangladesh. It is also frightening that in rural school, over 200 students have been running with only two teachers, report says. The Headmaster as well as other concerns informed the Education Officer of Upazila and Ministry concerned also of this drastic shortage of teachers. But it has brought no fruit at all. While the government has given the utmost priority to develop education sector by allocating big budgets, this harsh reality of teachers’ deficit is no mean tolerable. It is also very distressing that no recruitments could take place since 2012.
The only recruitment organ of public colleges – the Public Service Commission (PSC) is always failing to recruit adequate number of teachers in government colleges. The failure of the PSC is being blamed from lack of government’s good intension to make adequate recruitment. Besides, government is going to give non-government colleges the status of government colleges. Before launching this process, local MPs have already started taking a big amount of money from those who want to be recruited as teachers. It is worrying that many of the previously recruited teachers don’t own the merit for being teachers in schools and public colleges. Only for making money, such business centering recruitment may bring big setback to government efforts to achieve quality education. Big concern now is not only recruitment of adequate number of teachers but also quality teachers to improve the quality of education at all level.
