In a radio interview, Education Secretary Florencio Abad said that the agency would begin hiring new teachers with majors in math, science and English.
In earlier reports, DepEd had announced that they would recruit at least 10,000 additional teaching personnel before the opening of school year 2005-06 in order to address the lack of teachers.
According to Abad, most of the teachers presently handling one of the three core subjects in public schools have no graduate school training. This results in low grades and performance by the students in the subjects.
Abad said even PE or health instructors are forced to teach the core academic subjects due to severe lack of manpower.
Results of the recent High School Readiness Test (HSRT) given by DepEd to first-year high school students in Metro Manila showed only 60 percent of the students passed the test, most of them with a 32 to 36 percentage of correct answers.
In general, students of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) fared better than students in the National Capital Region (NCR).