Govt to recruit 15,000 teachers

The government is going to appoint 15,000 teachers for state-run primary schools across the country in the next four months to meet the shortage of teachers in these schools.
The appointees will include 5,000 headmasters and 10,000 assistant teachers.
The primary and mass education ministry will give the appointments.
Around 3,000 posts of assistant headmaster and more than 6,000 posts of assistant teacher are now vacant in the primary schools, said AKM Abdul Awal Majumder, secretary of the ministry,
Talking to The Daily Star, he said by the time the new appointments are given, some 2,000 posts of headmaster will fall vacant. Besides, around 6,000 posts of assistant teacher will fall vacant during the process of recruiting the new teachers.
“The post of headmaster falls vacant almost every day as someone goes into retirement,”Awal said.
He mentioned that they have taken the probable vacancies into consideration for giving new appointments.
Wishing anonymity, an official said, "The ministry has appointed over 60,000 teachers including 1,852 headmasters, and 57,703 assistant teachers in the last 32 months. But teacher shortage still remains a big problem in primary education."
The headmaster of a government primary school in the capital said, "Each primary school has four teachers on an average. If one of them attends a training, falls sick or goes on leave, it greatly affects normal academic activities at a school."
Some other headmasters expressed similar views. All of them however sought anonymity.
Contacted, Secretary of Bangladesh Primary Teachers Association BM Asadullah hailed the government move to appoint teachers for primary schools, and said it will reduce the disruption in children's education due to teacher shortage.
At present there are more than 2.13 lakh teachers, 58 percent of them female, in 37,672 government primary schools in the country, which have some 98.85 lakh students, according to the annual report 2010-11 of the ministry concerned.