Student-Teacher Ratio in Primary and Secondary Schools

Mr Christopher de Souza asked the Minister for Education (a) what is the current ratio of students to teachers in (i) Primary and (ii) Secondary schools; (b) what efforts are being taken to reduce this ratio further; and (c) what further steps, if any, are being taken to alleviate teachers of ancillary administrative work to enable them to focus their attention on teaching.

Our efforts to grow our teaching workforce have seen our pupil-teacher ratios (PTRs) improve from 26 in 2000 to 18 in 2012 for Primary schools, and from 19 in 2000 to 14 in 2012 for Secondary schools. This means that we now have one teacher for every 18 students in our Primary schools, and one teacher for every 14 students in our Secondary schools. Our PTRs are comparable to the OECD average of 15 and 14 for Primary and Secondary schools respectively.

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We have been recruiting and training on average about 2,500 new teachers per year over the past decade. Having invested significantly in the recruitment and training of some of our best talents as teachers, we are now focused on developing each teacher to be better at what he or she does.

We have also adopted a needs-based approach to resourcing, by deploying more teachers in schools and areas where they can contribute most to the learning of our students. For example, rather than to use the recent increase in teachers to reduce the class size for all students, we are deploying more teachers to support levelling-up programmes for low progress learners, with class sizes of 10 or less students.

To enable our teachers to pay more attention to the teaching and learning of our students, schools are also provided with Allied Educators (AEDs) and a school administrative team. We now have 2,500 AEDs to assist our teachers. The AEDs support teachers in teaching and learning, and provide behavioural, social and emotional support to students while the school administrative team assists teachers in administrative duties.

We have also been exploring the use of technology to reduce the administrative duties on our teachers, for example, in attendance taking or fees collection.

Nevertheless, we will continue to monitor the administrative workload of our teachers and ensure that our schools are adequately resourced to meet the needs of our students.