Israel facing shortage of English teachers, 40% not properly trained – ministry
Education Ministry floats program to streamline work visas for foreign English teachers to be employed formally in the school system
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
Israel’s education system continues to wrestle with a lack of qualified English teachers, with hundreds of positions waiting to be filled and a significant percentage of those already teaching the language doing so without adequate training, according to the Education Ministry.
Out of 19,000 English teachers in the system, around 40 percent haven’t been formally trained in teaching English, and the system currently has a shortage of 660 teachers, according to Iris Biton, the Education Ministry deputy director general, speaking at a Knesset Education Committee meeting this week.
According to ministry guidelines, to teach English in public schools a teacher must have both a BA degree and an Israeli teacher’s certificate, but not necessarily in the teaching of English. Therefore, teachers trained in other disciplines who also know English get recruited as English teachers.
During the committee meeting discussion, initiated by MK Yasmin Fridman (Yesh Atid), a number of potential solutions were floated to what was deemed a crisis in English-language education in the country, including programs to bring in more native English-speaking teachers from abroad.
According to Biton, a national program to improve English-language education was initiated in 2017 but after showing some achievements, was disrupted in 2020 during the COVID pandemic lockdowns and never properly reinstated.
Another program, called TALMA: The Israel Program For Excellence in English, active since 2014, brings English speakers from abroad to teach in summer programs, mostly in the periphery of the country, but due to bureaucratic constraints can’t bring non-Israelis to formally teach in schools during the school year.
“In the last decade, we have brought over 2,500 Jews from around the world to teach English to young people. But that is still not enough. To fill the ranks, we need to increase the number of people teaching and also bring in legally qualified teachers,” TALMA head Ido Mahatzri told the committee.
Biton acknowledged that currently, “it’s not possible to employ someone who isn’t a citizen” as a teacher in the education system except in certain individual cases, but said the ministry was working on a program, together with the Population and Immigration Authority, that would streamline work visas for qualified teachers from abroad.
“The need for quality English teachers will always be there. It has always been a problem,” said Tziona Levi, language division head at the Education Ministry.
She stressed technology programs and online learning as a way to alleviate the problem, a position dismissed by MK Yosef Taieb (Shas), chairman of the committee, who said that after COVID, “we saw that hybrid education doesn’t work, or only works partially,” especially for the ultra-Orthodox and Bedouin communities, who don’t always have access to the internet.
The discussion concluded with a recommendation to consider additional solutions to improve the level of English in the school system, including ideas for recruiting Israelis who have returned from working or studying abroad after learning the language, a program to teach non-language subjects in English by English-speaking teachers, recruiting tech workers as part-time English teachers, recruiting English-speaking retirees, and using high-school students who excel in English as tutors in lower grades.
