Monitors challenges facing teachers

Director of Educational Projects Support and Funding Fund Mohamed Omar said that problems of teachers in Egypt have accumulated for 40 years, pointing out that the reason behind increasing number of teacher is the so-called educational diploma which allows the doctor, engineer and other professions to join the profession of the teacher.

He added that what happened during previous periods at the request of the Ministry of Education is to expand the category of teachers through qualifying people from different sectors to join schools as teachers. He added that the ministry allowed doctors and engineers to take the jobs through gaining educational diploma.

Regarding challenges facing the education in Egypt, he said that Teachers in Egypt are more often than not underpaid, adding that this forces teachers to take up second jobs or be open to accepting bribes, usually from parents, to pass their children.

Unlike western and European schools, he said, Egypt has no major accountability infrastructure: schools rarely have to report to their districts about numbers or grades, and dialogue between schools and the Ministry of Education is rare.

He underlined that the education spending in Egypt is focused on university and high school, saying that this is due to a lack of foresight by the education ministry. He added that The government has decided that high school and post secondary are more important than primary school education – which isn’t necessarily true.

Regarding the private lessons crisis he said that It is much easier to understand the topic in private lessons where there are only several students, while classrooms are usually packed with up to 60 students.

Some classrooms in public schools are overcrowded to the extent that students cannot find desks, with no strict restrictions on the number of pupils per class. However, this was never the sole reason behind private tuition, with teachers pushing for it to supplement their salaries.