UNICEF Mongolia - Teachers College Columbia University

CHAPTER 2: THE TEACHING WORKFORCE
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• Hiring correspondence students with incomplete higher educaon who work part-me as
teachers
• Re-hiring rered teachers
• Redistribung teaching hours: assigning addional teaching hours to teachers in subjects for
which they have no training or license
• Hiring professionals without a teacher educaon degree (“unqualified teachers”)
• Accumulang teaching hours: assigning excessive teaching loads to teachers – 27-35 hours/
week
• Aracng qualified teachers who have another main source of income (farming, trade, private
sector, etc.) to work for a few hours at school (“part-me teachers”)
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This study examined whether latent teacher shortage—in the form of hiring substute teachers—also
occurs in Mongolia. The findings will be presented in Chapter 6 of this report.
2.6. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The most important findings of this chapter are summarized in the following:
TEACHERS IN MONGOLIA: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON RECRUITMENT INTO TEACHING,
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, AND RETENTION OF TEACHERS
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(1) Composion of school staff: Close to one-third of the school staff is either working in school
administraon or acts as support staff. School-based management and per capita financing was
introduced in 1998. This explains why every school has a management team that consists of at
least five members, regardless of school size: a principal, an educaon manager, a social worker,
an accountant, and an inventory clerk and dormitory administrator. Despite external pressure
to reduce non-educaonal staff over the past ten years, the two-to-one rao of staff to noneducaonal
staff has remained remarkably constant.
(2) Gender: Almost 96 percent of the teaching workforce is female, with a slightly higher proporon
of male teachers working at lower and upper secondary school and a much higher representaon
of men in school administraon.
(3) Teaching experience and age: The teaching workforce is remarkably young, as 30.6 percent of
all teachers have worked in schools for five years or less.
(4) Qualificaons: According to stascal informaon from MECS, only 0.7 percent of teachers are
currently unqualified. The proporon of unqualified teachers has diminished visibly over the
past fieen years. In 1996/97, the rao of unqualified teachers was 12.1 percent of the teaching
workforce. A closer examinaon, however, reveals a quadrupled expansion of higher educaon
in the period 1996/97 to 2010/2011. Thus, the eradicaon of the category “unqualified
teachers” does not necessarily imply that the quality of teachers has improved to the same
extent as the increase in number of degree holders. A significant number of the small, private
teacher educaon instuons are merely degree mills, while licensing programs do exist but do
not necessarily help to improve the quality of teaching.
(5) Rank and promoon: Approximately half of the teachers are currently in the lowest rank
as regular teachers; this reflects to some extent the young age of the teaching workforce in