Stressed by a critical teacher shortage Tonga's Ministry of Education now wants to hire 85 new teachers to fill some of the vacancies left by the 227 staff and teachers who accepted the government's voluntary redundancy package on June 30.

The rehiring was a calculated move, according to the Director of Education, Viliami Takau, who said that they knew by June 1 that they would need 85 new teachers at the end of June. But it was agreed to with the Public Service Commission (PSC) to let those teachers go and recruit new teachers from outside, "and not to recall teachers who had accepted the redundancy package."

Viliami said that they had already recruited 56 new teachers, and he was optimistic that within one or two weeks they would have resolved the anomalies over the shortage of teachers.

Viliami said that most the teachers who accepted the redundancy package were primary school teachers from Tongatapu, "there were no teachers from the two Niuas, two from Ha'apai, five from 'Eua and nine from Vava'u."

Viliami said that some of the teachers who accepted the redundancy package want to be rehired. "I believe there were those who accepted the redundancy package, and are now thinking that may be it is not enough and are wanting to return to work, but it was a policy that we had agreed to with the PSC in early June that we will not recruit back former teachers."

He added that the Friendly Islands Teachers' Association had written to ask the ministry to defer the redundancy for teachers until the end of the school year, but following discussion between the ministry and the PSC they decided to proceed with the June 30 redundancy and then to recruit new teachers. They wanted to reduce the full staff of the ministry from 1,300.

Meanwhile, the shortage of teachers has left schools with bigger classes, cancelled classes and increasing stress on teachers and students. In one primary school on Western Tongatapu it was reported that the six teachers had been reduced to only two after the redundancy programme.