UNICEF Mongolia - Teachers College Columbia University

CHAPTER 2: THE TEACHING WORKFORCE
larger schools employ office clerks and typists. 8 To control hiring, there exist centrally established
regulaons; for example, each school must hire a physician for every 1,000 students.
• Over eighty percent of the school staff is female and yet there is no gender parity for the posion
of school principal. This means, women are under-represented as senior school administrators
(notably as school principals), as compared to lower administrave or teaching posions.
2.2. GENDER, TEACHING EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATION
Gender: The teaching profession is predominantly female. As Table 6 demonstrates, women comprise
almost 96 percent of the teaching workforce in primary schools. The proporon of female teachers drops
in lower and upper secondary school but women nevertheless represent three-quarters of all teachers
at post-primary level.
Teaching Experience: The teaching workforce is remarkably young: 30.6 percent of all teachers have
worked for five years or less in schools. In September 2010, 1,171 new teachers were hired. In contrast
to this large group of new and young teachers, only 14.4 percent or 3,809 teachers have more than 25
years of work experience. The rejuvenaon of the teaching workforce is predominantly a result of the
expansion of general educaon, first from 10 to 11 years in 2004/05 and then from 11 to 12 years of
schooling in 2008/09. The expansion required the employment of a greater number of teachers, in great
part recruited from pre-service teacher educaon graduates.
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Qualificaons: According to stascal informaon from MECS, only 175 teachers out of a total of 26,358
teachers are unqualified teachers. This amounts to 0.7 percent of the teaching workforce. There has been
in a significant boom in teacher educaon studies over the past ten years. There are currently numerous
public and private universies that provide diplomas and bachelor’s degrees. A few of them, however,
are diploma mills or issue degrees with lile recognion in the market place. Figure 5 demonstrates that
the number of qualified teachers increased over the past 15 years from 87.9 percent to 99.3 percent. In
the same period, the number of enrollments in higher educaon quadrupled from 44,088 to 170,126.
The eradicaon of the category “unqualified teachers”—currently at a low of 0.7 percent—does not
necessarily imply that the quality of teachers has improved. There is significant public concern about
the large number of diplomas and degrees that are considered of limited value in the labor market, yet
cost a lot to obtain. With the excepon of the large teacher educaon programs, mostly based at public
universies, there is no direct link between qualificaon and the quality of teachers. The high number of
stascally qualified teachers masks the reality that many so-called qualified teachers have obtained a
second-class pre-service teacher educaon.
TEACHERS IN MONGOLIA: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON RECRUITMENT INTO TEACHING,
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, AND RETENTION OF TEACHERS
8 In the academic year 2010-2011, there were 669 accountants, 660 inventory clerks and dormitory administrators, and 362 office
clerks and typists (Stascal Abstract, 2011).
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