Taiwan Faces Teacher Shortage Days Before School Year Starts

Taiwan is facing a severe teacher shortage just three days before the start of the new school year, with hundreds of positions for substitute and contract teachers still unfilled. Official figures reveal 614 such positions remain vacant, exacerbating concerns about the quality of education.

The situation has prompted a joint call from the National Substitute and Contract Teachers Union and several Democratic Progressive Party legislators for urgent action from the Ministry of Education. They are advocating for a comprehensive national teacher supply and demand system, expedited hiring schedules for local education authorities, and a review of overtime teaching hour limits. The union argues that the current hiring timeline, with many positions only becoming available after formal teacher appointments are finalized in mid-July, leaves insufficient time to recruit substitute teachers before the academic year begins.

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The teacher shortage will cascade down from full-time teacher vacancies to substitute teacher shortages.

Legislator Fan Yun highlighted discrepancies in official data, noting that while the Ministry of Education reported a 99.58% teacher readiness rate for the upcoming academic year, this figure is based on total teacher allocations rather than actual vacancies. She pointed out that the remaining 614 substitute teachers and an unquantified number of temporary teaching assistants are still needed. Fan also criticized the practice of "multiple offers" where successful candidates accept positions in preferred cities after initial appointments, leading to a cascade of vacancies that schools struggle to fill in time.

To combat teacher overload and maintain educational quality, the union and legislators propose several solutions. These include adjusting the base teaching hours for elementary and middle school teachers, capping overtime teaching at nine sessions per week, and increasing administrative bonuses. They also suggest enhancing teacher attractiveness through better salaries and benefits, reducing non-teaching administrative burdens, and implementing measures to address frequent parent-teacher conflicts and potential lawsuits, such as establishing family education centers to guide parents.

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The hiring time is extremely compressed, so the union has repeatedly called for teacher recruitment to be finalized before mid-June, allowing a full month of July for substitute teacher matching.