The Ministry of Education and Training is setting up a programme to retrain surplus teachers in secondary and high schools, to deal with current shortages in kindergartens. — Photo nld.com.vn

HÀ NỘI – The Ministry of Education and Training is setting up a programme to retrain surplus teachers in secondary and high schools, to deal with current shortages in kindergartens.

Under the plan, about 40,000 teachers will be retrained to work in kindergartens.

According to the ministry, Vietnamese education is facing an excess of teachers in secondary and high schools, while pre-schools lack sufficient staff.

The ministry’s statistics have recently shown an excess of over 40,000 secondary and high school teachers across the country, while infant schools lacked more than 30,000 teachers.

To address this situation, some localities have transferred redundant teachers to teach in preschools. However, these teachers are facing difficulties due to the differences in teaching between schools.

The most common difficulty was that many secondary and high school teachers lacked of teaching skills for preschool-age children, said Nguyễn Thị Vân, a secondary school teacher who was assigned to teach in a kindergarten in the central Nghệ An Province.

“Although we have knowledge, we lack teaching skills for preschool. Teaching in kindergarten is very different to teaching in secondary and high schools, and it requires pedagogical skills and talent. Teaching in kindergarten will become torture if teachers do not have talent,” Vân told vietnamnet online newspaper.

In Thanh Hóa Province, more than 100 redundant secondary school teachers in Thạch Thành District were switched to teach in primary and preschool. However, more than 40 teachers were instructed to do other work, instead of teaching, the newspaper reported.

Discussing the situation at a conference held last week, the Education and Training Minister Phùng Xuân Nhạ said, at present, using excess teachers to fill the shortage in preschools was a temporary solution, but it posed risks for the quality of teaching in kindergartens.

According to the minister, unqualified teachers in preschools were one of the main causes behind violence in some classrooms.

To deal with this problem, the ministry had assigned teacher training colleges to set up a programme to retrain redundant teachers to teach in preschools which lack of teachers, the minister said.

This programme would be designed scientifically to improve the quality of teachers and will be used across the whole country, he said.

Teachers could learn in their locality or through online programmes to reduce overloading on teacher training colleges, Nhạ said.

The programme would also be flexible for teachers who specialise in math, English, literature, science, history, said Prof Nguyễn Văn Minh, rector of Hà Nội Teachers Training University which was assigned to set up the programme.

The ministry would work with educational departments and locals to develop exact statistics on the number of surplus teachers, Minh said.

Under the plan, the programme would be implemented in February, he added. - VNS