THE ALLIANCE of Concerned Teachers has urged the Department of Education to hire at least 150,000 teachers more instead of teaching aides.

This would lead to the reduction of class size from 50 students to 40, the group said.

The TDC said the hiring of retrenched private school teachers should be a priority, followed by the hiring of college graduates with a degree in education.

“The shift to remote learning and the lack of ample state support for such has more than doubled the workload—not to mention the expenses—of already overworked public school teachers. This will likely result in further decline of education quality and burn out among our educators. In that note, we find it necessary for the government to ease teachers’ workload by hiring more teaching personnel,” Raymond Basilio, the group’s secretary general, said in a statement.

Basilio said that teachers also communicate with parents of students, which is an extra workload. The use of blended learning also requires teachers to orient all stakeholders, which also takes time.

“Given these, we’ll need an additional 150,000 personnel to take on teaching loads to reduce teaching time to 5 hours or to redistribute students to classes of only 40. This will bring significant relief from the strains caused by the demands of education delivery amid the pandemic,” Basilio said.

He noted that the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers mandates a maximum of six teaching hours while the remaining two should be used for other teaching-related tasks.

ACT estimates that P45 billion will be needed to complete the 150,000 teaching personnel with a salary similar to that of a Teacher 1. It said that the funds may be sourced from the DepEd central office’s huge allocation for maintenance and other operating expenses.

“Since we want these personnel to perform teaching tasks, it’s only fair that they be given salaries similar to what other teachers currently receive, unlike DepEd’s proposal to pay para-teachers a measly P6,000–P11,000. This will also give them a head start in public schools that can be their edge for regularization upon meeting the minimum requirements,” Basilio said.