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Philippines struggles to fill 20,000 teaching jobs: ‘we are facing a learning crisis’
Industry players call for transparency in the teacher hiring process, and urge more concrete support for educators.
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https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/lifestyle-culture/article/3369126/philippines-struggles-fill-20000-teaching-jobs-we-are-facing-learning-crisis
By Sam Beltran Published: 4:00pm, 29 Sep 2026
The Philippines has 20,000 teaching vacancies to fill, a budget hearing has revealed, with sector insiders warning that the gap signals a mounting education crisis.
Those in the industry are calling for transparency in the teacher hiring process, including clear figures on budget allocation and positions filled amid problems of mismatch and improper targeting of job applicants.
At a House of Representatives plenary session last week, Antonio Tinio from the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) grilled officials over the lack of urgency, arguing that thousands of qualified applicants in the registry were still waiting for jobs.
This Week in Asia has contacted the country’s Department of Education for comment. At the session, it said that some positions were “hard to fill” because they lacked qualified candidates for certain specialised roles.
The department is tipped to receive some 976 billion pesos (US$15.6 billion) under the 2027 budget, with more than 31 billion pesos allocated for filling teaching vacancies and 12 billion pesos to promote 135,000 existing teachers.
“The cost of delay falls on learners and on teachers already in service. We are facing a learning crisis; we cannot close learning gaps while leaving needed teaching positions vacant and asking existing teachers to carry additional classes and tasks,” said Ruby Bernardo, ACT chairwoman.
Bernardo urged the government to provide teachers with concrete support rather than another promise of positions that went unfilled, citing a World Bank report that found 91 per cent of Filipinos aged 10 could not read or understand age-appropriate texts.
“That makes timely hiring especially urgent,” she said.
Hanibal Camua, executive director of Philippine Business for Education, a non-profit advocacy group, said the hiring gap reflected both a workforce alignment problem and a problem with teacher quality.
“Some education graduates pursue opportunities abroad, where teaching can offer better compensation,” Camua said. “Others move to private schools or to sectors such as [outsourcing] and virtual assistance, which can offer competitive entry-level salaries and, in some cases, less administrative burden.”
Figures from the Second Congressional Commission on Education, a national body created by the government to evaluate the country’s education system, show that the pass rate for teacher qualification exams between 2009 and 2023 was 33 per cent for junior school teachers and 40 per cent for secondary school teachers.
“That tells us that we have to address both ends of the pipeline. We need to make teaching a career that can attract and retain good people, while also ensuring that the institutions preparing our teachers are producing graduates who meet the standards required in today’s classrooms,” Camua said.
Teachers at state-funded schools in the Philippines begin with a monthly salary of 31,705 pesos (US$506), yet they are often saddled with non-academic tasks and overcrowded classrooms.
But simply reducing the issue to quality “puts the burden of explanation on applicants without examining the system that recruits and retains them”, Bernardo said.
“The education department should publish how many qualified applicants there are for each vacancy, where applicants withdraw, and which subjects and locations are hardest to staff. That would show whether the obstacle is a shortage of qualified applicants, a mismatch in deployment, slow hiring, or poor retention,” she said.
Mismatched expectations
The enduring shortfall raises questions about the broader state of education in the Philippines, especially after the department received a “historic” budget of 1.015 trillion pesos in 2026 – marking the first time the country has met the Unesco benchmark for education spending, which requires allocating 4-6 per cent of gross domestic product or 15-20 per cent of public spending to the sector.
“We should acknowledge those allocations while asking a more important question: what has actually reached schools? How many teachers have been appointed and deployed? How many classrooms and materials are in use? Have class sizes, workloads and learning outcomes improved?” Bernardo said.
The word “historic” did not match many teachers’ daily experiences due to a long history of chronic underfunding, she said, calling for “transparent reporting on actual spending and results” and measuring commitments against completed hiring and facilities.
For Wilhelm Sheila A. Pineda, a top-tier educator known as a “master teacher” at the San Fernando South Central Integrated School in La Union province, Education Secretary Sonny Angara’s admission that budget cuts left his department unable to hire new teachers for next year is deeply concerning.
“On one hand, we have qualified teachers waiting for opportunities, while on the other hand, our schools continue to experience shortages,” she said.
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“This is frustrating because teacher shortages are felt directly in schools. When there are not enough teachers, the workload does not simply disappear – it is absorbed by the teachers who are already there.”
Salve V. Calderon, a fellow master teacher in Bataan province, said the teacher shortage was especially alarming, with educators facing heavy levels of burnout as student populations and the number of schools continued to grow.
“Workload, burnout, compensation and too many non-teaching requirements are major factors. For me, teachers entered the profession to teach, but they are becoming exhausted by work that does not directly contribute to student learning,” Calderon said.
Actual school experiences also showed teachers constantly having to adjust to new programmes, requirements and changes being introduced, Pineda pointed out.
“Teachers are generally willing to contribute,” she said.
“The concern is whether every new programme comes with adequate preparation, coordination, orientation, time and resources.”
Calderon, who teaches English, said technology was creating another set of problems for teachers: “In many ways it has created more documentation, submissions, reports, programmes and sudden tasks.”
The Philippines should not simply fill the 20,000 positions without addressing the underlying learning crisis, according to Camua of Philippine Business for Education, adding that it is equally important to provide teachers with the right support to help students learn effectively.
Bernardo suggested that education officials set a public hiring timetable, identify bottlenecks in every division, speed up appointments and deployment, and regularly report on vacancies actually filled.
“The goal is not merely to clear a vacancy count,” Bernardo said. “It is to ensure every learner has a teacher with the time, resources and support to teach well.”
By Sam Beltran See https://sc.mp/6cqsa
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