Teacher Shortage Continues to Grow

It’s difficult to determine the exact extent of the teacher shortage in Hungary, and the state typically doesn’t help in this regard. Based on job advertisements on the Public Service portal, the number of ads seeking teachers has increased significantly this year, reports Szabad Európa.

There has been a growing teacher shortage in Hungary for quite some time. It’s rather difficult to say exactly how many teachers, educators, and other professionals are missing from the system because government data is not always reliable.

According to the latest publicly available data estimates by the Teachers’ Union (PSZ) and education researcher István Nahalka, in the 2020/21 school year, 34,000 professionals were already missing from public education; twenty thousand educators and fourteen thousand support staff directly assisting educational work.

This year, the number of educators in Hungary has sunk to a new historic low: 145,000 people worked full-time in public education. This includes thirty thousand kindergarten teachers. Roughly half of the 145,000 are elementary school teachers; according to KSH data, the most significant decline was observed here compared to the previous year.

This refers to positions like system administrators, school secretaries, cleaners, nannies, or physiotherapists. In this shortage figure, experts included the more than nine thousand retired educators re-employed at the time, as well as the nearly four thousand missing kindergarten teachers.

However, this is just an aggregated estimate; the teacher shortage shouldn’t be calculated piecemeal, as even if there were plenty of physical education teachers, they wouldn’t be able to teach math to children, as that’s not their expertise. Assigning a history teacher to teach physics to a few classes, just to resolve the issue on paper, is detrimental to the children who are taught by unqualified individuals.

From the summer of 2023, the teacher shortage was further exacerbated by the government’s regulation, referred to as the status law or revenge law, which, along with a small one-time salary increase, significantly worsened the working conditions of educators.

Thousands of educators subsequently left the profession after failing to achieve one of their most important demands: that their salaries should not increase based on the whims of the current government, but rather be linked again to the minimum wage or even the average graduate salary.

The state is trying to avoid discussing the problem.

“The statistics do not include ‘teacher shortage,'” the Ministry of Interior, responsible for education, responded briefly to Eduline’s question in August 2023.

However, you can check the state’s Public Service portal to see how many teaching, educational, and related positions are advertised. This is not accurate data either, as nothing happens if a school’s job advertisement is not posted there.

Moreover, the ads are removed over time, and many teachers don’t use the site, as it’s more effective to personally inquire at schools near their residence. However, in broad terms, the job advertisements also provide a picture of the geographical distribution of the teacher shortage.

Based on this, the most teachers were sought in the Budapest area, Borsod, and Győr-Moson-Sopron county in mid-July this year. However, in terms of population ratio, Borsod is clearly in the lead, as the fewest teachers have wanted to work there for some time. By far, the most sought-after position on the portal was math teacher. The demand for English teachers is also significant based on the job advertisements.

Experience is only a requirement in a fraction of the job ads; essentially, every school welcomes new graduates as long as they fill the need for the missing expertise.

From another publication (The Indicator System of Public Education), we can learn how visibly the active educators are aging. In 2022, almost half of them were over fifty years old.

It’s also a sign that in 2024, only 75 people out of those applying to ELTE, one of the largest teacher training institutions, marked mathematics as their first choice, with English being the most popular. In total, 1800 people applied for the integrated teacher training program at ELTE TTK in 2024, slightly exceeding the numbers from previous years but not reaching the pre-pandemic figures of 2019.

The latest idea in Hungarian education policy is to employ retired soldiers over 55 as teachers. The teacher shortage is resulting in a decline in the quality of education, which significantly affects the pace and extent of Hungary’s future economic development.