Leftist DK to investigate number of missing teachers in Hungarian education

The opposition Democratic Coalition (DK) will write to all school district heads to find out how many teachers are missing from Hungarian public education, with a view to working on a solution, a lawmaker of the leftist party told a press conference on Tuesday.

Gergely Arató said all sectors of public education suffer from a shortage of teachers. “This is not a unfortunate happenstance,” he said.

“It is the responsibility of the government which stripped teachers of their independence and humiliated them at every turn.”

Young teachers are expected to teach children for as little as 130,000-140,000 forints a month (EUR 399.5-430.2), he added.

At a separate press conference, Bence Rétvári, a state secretary of the human resources ministry, said that

the 2020 budget will boost funding for education as well as for family subsidies, health care and pensions.

Funds allocated for education were 645 billion forints higher in 2019 than in 2010, with a further raise of tens of billions of forints scheduled in 2020, he said.

In the past few years, those monies were mostly channelled into wage hikes, Rétvári said. Teachers’ wages have increased by 50 percent in the past few years, he said.

As we wrote a few weeks ago, the Hungarian nursery school system lacks almost 1,000 teachers on the one hand, and there is no second line. On the other hand, Hungarian teachers performed well in an OECD survey showing that they are professionally above the average but rarely use modern teaching techniques probably because most of them are already above 40, read more HERE.

Thousands of teachers, bus drivers, postal workers missing in Hungary

Source: MTI