Troubling: teachers are disappearing from Hungary

According to the latest figures from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the teaching profession in Hungary is ageing rapidly: there are hardly any young teachers entering the workforce, while the number of those over 60 is predominant in the field.

Népszava wrote about this alarming trend in the Hungarian education system, analysing new data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH). According to KSH, a total of 72,514 teachers worked in primary schools in the 2023/2024 school year, of whom only 6.7 percent were under 30 years old, i.e., young professionals starting their careers.

Hungarian education faces a shortage of professionals with few new teachers entering the workforce

As DNH reported previously, Hungary’s public education system faces a considerable shortage of pedagogues. Last year, the president of the teachers’ union warned that over the next five years, a total of 22,000 employees are expected to be missing from the workforce.

In the 2023/2024 school year, the number of educators in the system plummeted to previously unseen lows. Only 145,589 teachers worked during the last school year, 1,610 fewer than a year before.

Moreover, last year, only 2231 new graduates started working at different levels of education, a fraction of those who had started the teacher training programme in years previous. This illustrates that there is a significant fall-off in the profession.

The biggest drop in the 2023/2024 schoolyear was recorded in the number of primary school teachers, especially among the younger age groups. In the past year, there were 4,852 primary school teachers aged 30 and under. Although this is slightly higher than last year (when 4,687 teachers were under 30), this increase is well below the rise in the proportion of older age groups in the profession.

The number of primary school teachers aged 40-44 has fallen from 10,023 to 9,298, and the number of educators aged 35-39 from 7,077 to 6,416 in the same year. There was also a slight decrease in the 30-34 age group, from 3,975 to 3,894. The wave of resignations in the past year has undoubtedly played a role in this, with many in these age groups saying no to the new law on teachers’ careers, the so-called “Status Act,” and the changes it entailed for professionals, according to representatives of the sector.

The teaching profession is an ageing sector in Hungary, with those over 60 highly overrepresented

The largest share of primary school teachers are aged 45-59, but even within this age group, most, a total of 13,744 people, fall in the 55-59 category. Comparably, there are roughly 11,500 teachers in both the 45-49 and 50-54 age ranges.

One of the most significant changes in the education system was seen in the number of older pedagogues who are close to or already over the age of retirement. The number of those aged 60-64 increased from 8,462 to 8,848, and the amount of teachers aged 64 and over rose from 1,577 to 2,171 in primary schools in one year. The latter figure represents a staggering 37.6 percent increase.

Overall, there were 11,019 full-time pedagogues aged 60 and over in primary schools last year, exactly 980 more than a year earlier and 2,189 more than in the 2021/2022 school year. This means that the proportion of older educators in the system has increased by around 24.8 percent in just two years.

One of the key reasons for this increase was the government’s simplification of the rules regulating the re-employment of retired educators in 2022 and 2023, a change that was aimed at easing the shortage of workers in the education system.

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Source: Népszava