Many teachers continue to refuse to work in rural areas despite more government incentives to encourage them to teach children in remote regions of Laos.
In 2010-11, the government increased its quota for civil servants to allow for the inclusion of 9,600 teachers in an effort to address teacher shortages in rural areas, but while there has been some success with the policy there is still a shortage of teachers in remote areas.
“For the new civil servants, we have given priority to teachers who are willing to work in these more demanding posts because that is where the need is most acute,” Deputy Minister of Education and Sports Mr Lytou Bouapao told Vientiane Times yesterday.
“Many teachers insist on working in urban areas as it is more convenient, while some want to move to rural areas just because they want to become civil servants. As result, many of them returned to work in urban areas or turned to other careers after becoming civil servants.”
The government also has a policy to pay higher salaries to teachers who work in remote areas but, unfortunately, the policy has not been fully implemented.
Another problem is that teachers in rural areas did not receive their salary on time. In some cases, it takes months for them to get their wages, which can discourage people from accepting rural teaching positions.
Meanwhile, teachers in urban areas receive their salary on time through bank or ATM deposits and are able to supplement their income by running a business, teaching part time or doing extra jobs.
Adding to the difficulty of rural postings, some teachers have to teach ‘twin' classes of about 60 or 70 students due to the shortage of education staff.
Mr Lytou said one way to address the problem is to prioritise areas that lack teachers and recruit students for teacher-training and then send them back to be teachers in their province.
Another solution, he suggested, is to strongly enforce the government's policy to base teachers' salaries on how difficult their area is to live or work in.
Compared to other countries, teaching is not a popular job in Laos.
In many countries, only the top students are selected to become teachers, but most Lao students end up studying to become teachers because they have no other option as they did poorly on their exams and don't qualify for other majors, according to Mr Lytou.
Laos has about 63,000 teachers, of whom about 37,000 teach in the formal education system. In urban areas, the number of teachers is higher than the demand while teacher shortages persist in many rural areas.
In response, the government has increased its civil servant quota for teachers for two or three years to encourage them to work in rural areas by making them civil servants, but many of the teachers are still not interested in doing so.
