As Egypt suffers a real deficiency in the number of school teachers, especially those of primary schools, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi last week instructed the Ministry of Education and Technical Education to appoint 30,000 teachers annually for five consecutive years.

The problem of a teachers’ shortage in K12 education years surfaced at the beginning of the current school year in early October when Minister of Education Tarek Shawki asked for volunteers for LE20 an hour to fill in the gap resulting from the ministry’s limited resources.

Al-Sisi instructed the government to provide LE3.1 billion as additional incentives for teachers.

The new teachers will be appointed through a competition, according to Mahmoud Hassouna, spokesman of the Ministry of Education and Technical Education. “When the ministry finishes preparing and defining the technical and educational qualifications for choosing teachers, an official announcement on the contest will be made. Defining these qualifications is being worked on in coordination with the Central Agency for Organisation and Administration,” Hassouna said.

“The results of the contest will be announced within two months and teachers will be chosen mainly from among graduates of the faculties of education, those who hold a diploma in education, and those who have previously served as part-time teachers,” explained Hassouna.

Fulfilling the needs of teachers for the schools, part of the Decent Life initiative, will be included in the competition, Hassouna said, adding that the contest will be public and open to all.

Abdel-Raouf Allam, chairman of the Supreme Council of Education Trustees, praised President Al-Sisi’s directives, saying the shortage in the number of teachers ranges from between 200,000-300,000. “By appointing 30,000 teachers annually for five years means a total of 150,000 teachers. This would help in developing the education sector,” Allam said.

According to Allam, the shortage of teachers had reached a stage where it was necessary to come up with “complete” and “radical” solutions. “The new appointments reveal the government’s high awareness of the problems which the education system is suffering from,” Allam added.

Educational expert and professor at Ain Shams University Mohamed Fathallah noted that according to the Egyptian constitution the government should allocate six per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to developing the education sector, four per cent for pre-university education and two per cent for higher education. But the government has allocated only 2.4 per cent to the entire educational system. “This year the government has allocated LE56 billion for school education. Most of the money goes to salaries with very little invested in new schools and training teachers.”

According to Fathallah, the country needs at least 30,000 more classrooms.

Figures from the Information Systems and Decision-Making Support Centre put the overall number of schools in Egypt at 57,749, with 518,553 classrooms for 24,403,924 students. There are currently one million teachers.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 27 January, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.