Teacher waiting list contains 50,000 names

By Andria Kades

The current teachers appointment list due to be completely scrapped in 2027, has up to 50,000 on waiting lists in a system that currently employs about 12,000.

The huge discrepancy in numbers as of February this year according to an education annual report for 2014, shows that in 2014, some 2917 applications were made – a 12 per cent drop over the previous year – bringing the total applicants on waiting lists to 47,713, four times the amount of teaching staff for the past academic year at 11,925.

For example, German teachers, which have the lowest hiring rate currently have 277 applicants on the waiting list. Though this may seem like a small number, with an average rate of 0.2 per year, the last one would be hired in more than 1,000 years.

They could start their job in the academic year 3399 – 3400.

Several subjects follow suit with teachers in Art, Russian, Philology , Biology, Chemistry, French and English to name a few, that are expected to start their job in some 100 years. It is worth noting that this system will be partially scrapped starting in 2017, introducing an exam based system amongst other criteria, splitting the two lists 50 – 50 and fully enforcing the new version as of 2027.

According to the report 70 per cent of the teachers on waiting lists are candidates for secondary school education at 33,293 while 8,248 are enlisted for primary, pre-school and special education. The remaining 6,172 are on the secondary technical school lists.

The cost of substitute teachers had a 0.1 per cent increase to €7.5 million in 2014, the report said with a breakdown of primary school costing €5.1m, secondary school €2.3m and secondary technical schools at almost €64,000.

More females were employed in pre-schools, primary education, special education and secondary education while male staff were more dominant in technical schools. In primary schools for instance, just over 80 per cent of teachers were female while about 20 per cent were male.

Technical schools on the other hand, were comprised of 79 per cent male teachers and the other 21 per cent by females.

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