Even After Passing the Certification, 'Sullen Faces'... All Successful Candidates for Seoul Elementary School Teachers Are on 'Standby'

This Year 114 Passers and Last Year 5 Passers Total 119

It has been confirmed that none of the successful candidates of the elementary school teacher appointment exam in the Seoul area have been assigned positions and are currently waiting. As a result, there are calls for the establishment of mid- to long-term measures to resolve the appointment waiting issue.

According to the Ministry of Education and the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education on the 26th, as of March 1, there are 119 teacher appointment candidates waiting because they have not been assigned to public elementary schools in the Seoul area. This number includes all 114 successful candidates from the 2023 appointment exam, plus 5 who passed the 2022 appointment exam but have yet to find jobs.

Seoul has a notably longer waiting period for appointments compared to other cities and provinces, which has become a problem. An analysis of Ministry of Education data by independent assembly member Min Hyung-bae last year showed that since 2017, successful candidates in the Seoul area have had to wait an average of 15.6 months before appointment.

The number of successful candidates for the Seoul area elementary school teacher appointment exam has steadily decreased from 382 in the 2018 academic year to 368 in 2019, 366 in 2020, 303 in 2021, 216 in 2022, and 114 in 2023. This represents a reduction of more than one-third over five years.

Last year, the government proposed cutting the number of public school teachers by 2,982 for the first time in history. The quota for public elementary school teachers, which had been reduced according to the existing teacher supply plan, also decreased by 1,136 compared to the previous year.

In July last year, when the selection scale for the 2023 Seoul elementary school teacher appointment exam was preliminarily announced as 100, Cho Hee-yeon, Superintendent of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, issued a public statement condemning the Ministry of Education’s policy to reduce the quota.

A Ministry of Education official explained, “We will conduct new recruitments at an appropriate scale through consultations with city and provincial education offices, considering various factors such as retirement and leave scales to prevent excessive numbers of waiting candidates.”