Ukrainian schools face a critical shortage of teachers, which is becoming an increasingly acute problem in the country's educational sphere. This phenomenon not only threatens the quality of education, but also calls into question the stability and effectiveness of the educational process in Ukrainian schools.
As the Minister of Education Oksen Lisovyi said in an interview with "BVS Ukraine", one of the main reasons for the shortage of teachers is low salaries. The average salary of a teacher now is 12,000 hryvnias, but it can be lower, depending on the workload, the minister said.
In preschool institutions, teachers' salaries are even lower - 6 thousand.
"In fact, many teachers, especially young ones, receive salaries below the minimum (now the minimum salary in Ukraine is 8,000 hryvnias - Ed.). There are other additional payments, but even with them the salaries are meager. It is more profitable for teachers to engage in tutoring or to leave the profession altogether. At the same time, the load on teachers is increasing. That's why people are leaving en masse," says Yuriy Kinkov, director of the Kyiv educational complex No. 141 "ORT".
The minister says that the shortage of teachers in English, mathematics, physics, and computer science is felt most.
And it is not surprising.
Teachers of informatics and mathematics go to IT en masse, English teachers go to tutoring and private language schools.
On average, an individual lesson with a tutor costs from 300-400 hryvnias. That is, the same 18 hours a week, for which a teacher in a public school receives about 8 thousand hryvnias a month, private lessons can provide up to 21.6-28.8 thousand a month.
And if you conduct 5 lessons a day, the amount increases to 40,000 per month.
English teachers can count on higher rates - up to 500-600 per lesson, that is, they have the opportunity to earn up to 60 thousand per month.
Therefore, the outflow of teachers from schools is serious.
And the government is doing almost nothing to stop it now. On the contrary, the Cabinet of Ministers recently adopted a resolution that effectively "rejected" teachers who left for Europe. And in general, everything that happens in schools corresponds to the policy of "optimization" of educational institutions, which Ukraine promised the IMF even before the war.
For parents, such trends mean only one thing: the quality of children's knowledge is declining. And even in order for the child to master the standard curriculum, you have to pay extra.
