Shortage of 498,000 teachers in Indonesia next year?

[serious_fun]

The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education said that there will be a shortage of almost 500,000 teachers across Indo next year after considering retirement.

In 2019, Indonesia’s schools needed to hire a million full-time teachers. But the roles were often filled by contract teachers, who lacked quality assurance.

from this blog. One could spin the recruitment of almost 500,000 'teaching staff' within 7 years as a success, but lack of teacher training is a genuine problem.

Perhaps the military could be called in?

 

[Wally]

I worked for over 20 years with the Indonesian central and local governments to improve the allocation and education of teachers. For years Indonesia had a more favourable student : teacher than many (or most) other countries. The problem is the distribution of those teachers:

• Some schools simply have more teachers than they need and local governments are reluctant/afraid to redeploy them to those lacking teachers because teachers don't want to teach in remote areas (where the vacancies are)
• Primary schools expect to have a teacher for every grade (i.e. six teachers) however few students they have. Most countries expect teachers in small schools to teach more than one grade at the same time (multigrade teaching)
• Many secondary school teachers refiuse or claim they are unable to teach more than one subject. The irony is that grade 6 primary school teachers teach every subject, while many grade 7 teachers claim to be only able to teach one subject. Most countries expect secondary school teachers to teach at least 2 subjects
• There are a lot of qualified teachers who are contracted by schools or local government using their own funds rather than being employed as civil servants. They fill in the gaps as well as filling in for civil servant teachers who are simply not doing their jobs. They could be employed on permanent contracts.

This was the situation 3 or 4 years ago before I retired. It may have changed but I doubt it