Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, head of the Senate committee on basic education, on Thursday asked the Department of Education to study the possibility of shortening the teaching hours of teachers.
During his Senate committee hearing on the Implementation of Republic Act 4670, or the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers, Gatchalian said the Philippines was one of the countries with the most number of teaching hours, reaching 1,218 hours in one year or six hours a day.
In other countries, Gatchalian said, the number of teaching hours in a year was only 706, which was equivalent to four hours a day.
This number of teaching hours, Gatchalian said, became shorter with a higher grade level.
To resolve this, he said, the Department of Education should hire more non-teaching personnel who would be doing administrative work.
It is said in the Magna Carta for Public School teachers that classroom teaching should be only six hours, but Gatchalian says it exceeds eight hours due to the heavy workload.
Khristean Navales, president of the Quezon City Public School Association, says the teaching hours of teachers should be reduced especially with the added workload due to the pandemic.
“There is also the issue of work overload because of the oversized classes. But teachers can do nothing about it and instead teach that many number of students,” Navales said.
The Action SOLIDARITY for the EMPOWERMENT of TEACHERS or ASSERT, and E-NET PHILIPPINES secretary general Fidel Fababier blamed the Education department.
Fababier said it was clearly stated in the Magna Carta that the actual teaching hours should be only four, and the two hours were for the non-teaching classroom-related work like the preparation of teaching materials.
The department had this interpreted by the Civil Service Commission, which said that all government employees should work for eight hours.
Undersecretary Jesus Mateo said they would issue guidelines in connection with the teaching loads.
Senator Imee Marcos aired her support for the plan of the department to create non-teaching positions to ease the burden of teachers.