Chapter E
School personnel and the system of auxiliary educational services

1. School personnel

The number of people employed in public education in Hungary is very high by international comparison. According to the data of a 1995 survey the number of people employed in public education in Hungary amounted to 8.6% of the whole labour force while the respective OECD average was 5.4% (Education at a Glance, 1997)¹. The high rate was partly due to the fairly large size of the teaching work force: 4.2% of the total labour force was employed in teaching in primary and secondary education in 1995. (Only Belgium showed a similarly high rate with its 4.1%.) The proportion is even more striking if we take all levels of schooling (together employing 5.7% of the total labour force while the average rate in the OECD countries is 3.9%). The widespread network of kindergartens can account for this (see Chapter C: The education system, progress within the system). However, the high rate is largely explained by the big number of the auxiliary employees in public education, whose percentage in the total work force of Hungary was 2.8% while only 1.7% in average in the OECD countries in 1995. Only Denmark had similarly favourable rates in the statistics (2.8%) surpassed by the USA alone, a country well-known for the high number of auxiliary staff employed in education (4.0%).

In view of this data it is no wonder that the fiscal restrictions described in detail in Chapter B (Educational policy, the administration and financing of education) had a serious impact on the number of people employed in public education. The decrease in numbers affected the auxiliary staff more than the teachers. The total number of people employed in public education in 1996 decreased to 97.2% of the number of the previous year but this percentage actually conceals a small increase in professional staff (104%) and the drastic decrease in the number of other employees (86.6%) (see Table 1). These measures must have reduced the high rate of employment in public education that was indicated by the OECD data quoted above for the year before. For the interpretation of Table 1 it is important to note that besides teachers people employed in public education form two major groups. One of them comprises professional staff usually with higher educational qualifications (speech-therapists, psychologists, specialised doctors, special educational assistants, librarian-teachers, kindergarten secretaries, free-time organisers, social workers, system programmers, laboratory technicians, administrative operators, officers of labour, personnel and educational matters, maintainer of musical instruments, swimming instructor), the other group of staff are usually employed for maintenance tasks (maintenance personnel, fire-tender, school-yard attendant, porter, etc.). The category of “other staff" in Table 1 basically refers to the latter group.

Table 1
Number of people employed in public education, in 1991, 1995 and 1996

---

specialised tasks	1991.	1995.				1996.
	total number of employees	total number of employees	number auxiliary staff	number of professional staff		total number of employees	number auxiliary staff	number of professional staff
kindergarten education	58 532	25 883	35 879	61 762		21 836	38 191	60 027
general school education	100 461	36 941	71 762	108 703		30 897	74 945	105 842
general secondary education	12 103	5 319	9 707	15 026		4 380	10 367	14 747
secondary vocational education	14 527	7 014	13 672	20 686		6 661	14 492	21 153
technical school education	14 512	7 026	10 475	17 501		6 011	10 010	16 021
trade school education	1 265	577	1 486	2 063		491	1 285	1 776
public education total	252 808	92 023	162 267	254 290		77 758	168 938	246 696

---

Source: Department of Public Educational Planning, Ministry of Education.

1.1. The employment, the stratification and the salaries of teachers

There have been significant changes implemented in teachers' employment and payment relations and conditions of service for the past decade, which have fundamentally restructured the labour relations formerly characteristic of the profession. Teachers used to be state employees who worked under strictly regulated conditions but in great security, but by the middle of the 1990s they had become local public employees, whose work became more and more determined by the special environment of their area and school. The framework of the teachers employment, payment, promotion and working conditions have been laid down in the 1990 Act on the Local Governments, the 1992 Act on Public Employees, the 1993 Public Education Act and its Amendment in 1996 and in the National Core Curriculum.

As a consequence of these regulations teachers today are public employees - with the exception of teachers in non-local governmental schools - and their employer is the head of the school. Teachers in private, foundational, denominational schools and kindergartens do not enjoy a public employee status but their conditions of service (due partly to the legal regulations and partly to the agreements between the state and the maintainers of these school) are roughly the same as those of their colleagues in public employment.

The decrease in pupil numbers in the 1990s was not followed by a decrease of teachers employed in schools until 1995 but then, as a consequence of the new economic policies, a decrease set in in the number of certain teacher groups. The processes of the first half of the decade can be explained by the needs arising from the educational expansion in Hungary, which kept the demand for teachers high despite the diminishing pupil numbers. The reasons for the demands rising were: the abolition of the state monopoly on school maintenance, the striving of small villages and towns to open their own schools, changes in the school structure, and the expansion of secondary schooling. Nevertheless, there were governmental measures, too, which fuelled these demands, such as the adoption of the act on the legal status of public employees in 1992 (which increased teachers' job security), and the decrease in the compulsory number of lessons to be taught, which was the ruling of the then ministry.

As a result, the number of teachers employed in public education - after a short and slight decline at the beginning of the 1990s - grew further between 1993 and 1995. But after 1995 - due to the new governmental measures and to the decisions of the school maintainers and employers - the numbers started to decline. The decrease did not have the same rate in each school type: the strongest decrease took place in vocational and primary education while the number of teachers employed in secondary education continued to rise even in this period (see Figure 1).

Figure 1
Changes in the numbers of teachers, by school type, 1990/91-1996/97 (previous year = 100%)

---

---

Source: Department of Public Educational Planning, Ministry of Education.

Though it fluctuated from 1990 on, the number of kindergarten children did not change significantly. Yet the number of kindergarten teachers decreased by 5% within 6 years, which contributed to the increase in the kindergarten children per teacher ratio. The number of general school pupils decreased by 15% between 1990 and 1996 but the number of teachers in this school type only decreased by 8%. The restructuring of secondary education is well illustrated by the statistics according to which the number of students in the technical schools for skilled workers declined by 36% within 6 years and the number of their teachers decreased by 24%. The 27% increase in the number of students in secondary education resulted in a 29% increase in the number of teachers employed in such schools.

A minority of teachers having left public education were dismissed from their schools. Some of them found employment elsewhere, others became unemployed. The rate of unemployed teachers among the total teaching force of 1997 was 3.2%, which was similar to the general unemployment rate of those with higher educational qualifications (3.4% in January and February 1997). The highest unemployment rate is among kindergarten teachers, which indicates that it is in this school type from which teachers are dismissed most and that they cannot find employment elsewhere.

In spring 1997 there was a survey carried out in schools where the largest numbers of teaching positions were disestablished in the school years of 1995/96 and 1996/97 (Liskó, 1997b). The reasons and the forms of these measures were analysed with the help of the answers given by the school heads. Class mergers and teacher dismissals happened mostly in the schools of smaller towns. School-mergers were carried out five times as often (20%) in smaller towns as in other larger towns and cities. In most places the decreasing of the teacher numbers was carried out painlessly, i.e. by granting early retirement. But in more than one-third of the schools surveyed there were teachers leaving voluntarily or being dismissed. While retirement or early retirement affected more than the average number of teachers in small school towns, there were more teachers in Budapest who were transferred to other schools or left voluntarily.

Stratification within the teaching profession

One of the main characteristics of the teaching profession in Hungary is the strong stratification of teachers along the lines of different school levels and school types. There are at least nine different categories of teachers in Hungary. The most numerous category is teachers with a general school teacher qualification (in 1996 28.3% of all teachers in Hungary belonged to this group). Members of the smallest group have the vocational qualification of a skilled worker (some 3% of the total teaching force). The majority of the teachers with a given educational qualification work at the appropriate type of school but it is more and more common for teachers to work in schools other than would follow from their qualifications (see Table 2).

Table 2
Breakdown of full-time teachers in public education by level of educational qualification and school type, 1996/97

---

educational qualification	kindergarten	8-grade general school	special kindergartens and general schools	special trade schools	general secondary school	secondary vocational school	technical school	other	total
kindergarten teacher	30 847								30 847
primary school teacher		36 212							36 212
lower secondary school teacher		40 469			1 287	1 835	1 954	263	45 808
upper secondary school teacher		5 614			11 674	8 498	1 403	112	27 301
vocational teacher							3 503	223	3 726
teacher of special education			4 062*						4 062
non-qualified teacher	834	605	265*		102				1 806
teachers with higher educational qualification but no teaching qualification		514			70	1 534	2 290**	320**	4 728
teachers with other qualifications, not fitting any of the categories above	210	244	2 190*				4 462	73	23
total	31 891	83 658	6 028	489	13 133	16 329	9 223	941	161 692

---

Source: Department of Public Educational Planning, Ministry of Education.
^* all institutions of special education together
^** all teachers without an educational qualification

Like in all school systems there are differences to be observed between teachers working in different school types. A 1997 teacher survey has revealed, for example, that among general school teachers, obviously more of whom live in villages and are women, there are fewer teachers with higher qualifications, they tend to be less mobile and to earn less yet they usually live in bigger houses and most of them own a car (Nagy, 1997). The type of place where a teacher lives also adds to the factors of stratification, especially whether a teacher works in a town or in a village. (This factor is not fully independent of the school type either because the majority of the general schools operate in smaller settlements while there are hardly any villages that have a secondary school.) There are - proportionately - more trade union members among rural teachers than among teachers in Budapest, more rural teachers are religious and they are less active in professional developmental work, such as the preparation of local curricula.

Besides the work place and the qualifications possessed age plays an important role in the stratification of teachers. The sample of the teacher survey of 1997 (mentioned above) had an average age of 40.3 years. 14.7% of the sample were in their twenties, 32.7% in the thirties, 33.4% in their forties, 18.3% in their fifties, and 1% of the teachers were over 60 years of age. Hungarian teachers as a whole are much younger than their counterparts in the OECD countries, where 40% of the teachers were between 40 and 49 years old and only 11% of the teachers were under 30 in 1993 (Education at a Glance, 1996)². From the countries of Central Europe we only have comparative data from the Czech Republic, where in 1994/95 15.4% of the teachers were in their twenties, 30% in the thirties, 27.3% in their forties, 21.5% in their fifties, and 5.8% of the teachers were over 60 years of age, i.e. the age structure is very similar to that of Hungary.

The differences between the sexes show similar differences between the two regions of Europe. In Central Europe, and in Hungary, teaching is more of a female profession than in the economically more developed countries of the world (see Table 3).

Table 3
Percentage of women teachers in international comparison, 1994/95

---

	Czech republic	Hungary	Poland	Slovakia	OECD average**
kindergarten	93.7	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
8-grade general school	75.7	83.7	85.3	90.3 (lower cycle) 76.5 (upper cycle)	64.7 (primary and lower secondary)
general secondary school	67.0	67.5	74.0	68.4	43.9 (upper secondary)
secondary vocational school	60.4	57.4*	64.5	49.1
technical school	56.1		51.3	61.2

---

Source: Education at a Glance, 1996; Major Trends, 1996.
^* secondary vocational school and technical school together
^** 1994

Income relations in the teaching profession

Besides the worsening of their labour market positions teachers for the past few years have had to face the relative deterioration of their salaries, too. The average basic salary of secondary teachers was slightly less than 39.000 HUF a month in 1996 and their actual earning was slightly more than 50.000 HUF on average. The average basic salary of general school teachers was just under 34.000 HUF, their actual earning was just over 42.000 HUF. The average variance of salaries was between 13 and 15 thousand HUF. The rate of other supplementary incomes, which come on top of the basic salaries, (overtime pay, bonuses, etc.) was 15-16% in primary and secondary schools and 13% in kindergartens. While at the beginning of the decade the salary levels at the budgetary institutions lagged 10-15% behind the average salaries in the business sphere, (the difference between the business and the public sphere is similar in the developed Western countries) by today the difference has grown to 40% in Hungary (see Table 4).

Table 4
Incomes by public employment sector as percentages of incomes in the economic sphere, 1993-1996 (economic sphere = 100%)

---

	1993	1994	1995	1996
research, experimental development	73.1	85.9	84.4	65.0
public administration	75.9	81.9	85.6	66.7
education	58.1	61.3	59.6	47.0
health and social care	67.0	70.7	66.7	57.7
vocational teaching, cultural and sport activities	76.6	88.1	86.3	70.5
average income in these public sectors	67.9	71.5	71.2	58.1

---

Source: Szép, 1997.

All this means that even though teacher salaries have grown continually (growth has been 189.1% since 1990) the rate of growth remains much below the growth in the economic sphere (which has been 272.7% since 1990). The opening of gap in salary between the two spheres has become manifold compared to the beginning of the decade. A similar change characterises salaries in the white collar fields: the ranking of professions in this respect has not changed since the beginning of the decade but the extent of the differences has grown. Teacher salaries do not even reach half the salaries of the best paid professions. An internationally accepted indicator that measures the relative size of teacher salaries is the comparison of a teacher's yearly income with the per capita GDP. In public education the incomes of teachers in the OECD countries is usually 1-1.7 times the per capita GDP. Teacher salaries in Hungary do not even reach three-thirds of the per capita GDP. The indicator for secondary school teachers is 0.72, for general school teachers it is 0.68, and for kindergarten teachers it is 0.52.

Teachers' workload

After having shown the lag of Hungarian teacher salaries compared to the OECD countries we have to mention some indicators that are more favourable in Hungary: the teacher/pupil ratio (11.2 in primary education) and the number of compulsory lessons (20 per week for most teachers). Taking into account the stabilising tendency of the decline in pupil numbers and the low performance level of the country's economy, a significant increase in teacher salaries is hard to envisage these two indicators remaining unchanged. Other countries in the region can also be characterised by a rather low number of compulsory lessons and a favourable teacher/pupil ratio.

The vicious circle of the low salaries and/or the “over-employment" of teachers (stemming from the lower number of compulsory lessons and from the good teacher/pupil ratio) will probably be harder to break in Central Europe - where the memories of the employment model of the socialist period are still vivid - than in the richer Western countries. In Hungary, for example, rather than raising the salaries the policy of decreasing the compulsory lessons was often employed, which led to the regular practice of supplementing salaries with overtime pay.

At the level of the central budget, this resulted in savings since the pay for overtime per lesson remained low and not the whole teaching body received such supplements. This solution explains the strange phenomenon that while the number of compulsory lessons to be taught by Hungarian teachers was among the lowest by international comparison, 17 to 20% of all lessons were given during overtime in every school type in 1995.

Based on the 1997 teacher survey we can say that overtime is undoubtedly used to supplement salaries: 76% of teachers giving less then 20 lessons a week received pay for overtime in the month preceding the survey. (The rate of teachers with 20 lessons a week doing overtime is even higher: 82.2%, and 90.2% of teachers with more than 20 lessons also do overtime.) Our statement is proved by the finding that the quantity of overtime shows a correlation with the financial means of the individual school types. The most overtime pay was paid out in the institutions of vocational education (91.1% of their teachers received such pay), the least in the general schools (for 79.4% of the teachers).

Promotion in the teaching profession

The question of promotion is closely connected with teacher salaries. The introduction of compulsory in-service training and of professional examinations by the 1996 Amendment to the Public Education Act has had a serious impact on this field. The new ruling that a teacher who has passed a professional examination has to be upgraded in the salary scale of public employees has introduced a new system of promotions for teachers. Time after time the idea has been voiced that an independent teacher salary scale should be worked out, which would allow the rewarding of quality work and extra performance, but it has not happened yet. With the professional examinations becoming compulsory this developing system of promotions can be expected to function as an “additional salary scale", where those taking examinations more frequently than prescribed will have better chances for promotion.

Nowadays there are few opportunities to “fast track" in the teaching career. The possibilities allowed by the salary scale of public employees (upgrading to a top salary band, which can be given for extra qualifications or an outstanding performance) were used by the employers for 32% of the teachers according to the teacher survey of 1997. Grading teachers in category “F"³ is closely connected with the age of teachers (55.6% of the 50-59-year-old teachers and 42.7% of the 40-49-year-old teachers are in category “F" as opposed to the 3.9% of teachers in their twenties and 22.2% of teachers in their thirties). Category “F" is also connected with the qualifications of teachers (kindergarten and primary school teachers and people with no teaching qualifications are graded here in numbers much below the average), and it is also connected with the location (teachers in villages are much less often graded in this category than the average even though the formal criteria are met).

A way of promotion within the school is appointing a teacher head of department. According to the survey this happened with 16.9% of teachers and was connected with age as well: 23.7% of teachers in their fifties and 22.4% of teachers in their forties were heads of departments as opposed to the 13.5% of teachers in their thirties and 3.7% of teachers in their twenties. Becoming a school head - though it can be considered a kind of career defection - is a promotion opportunity as well. 7.8% of the teachers asked thought that they might become a school head within five years. Considering this possibility is more characteristic of male than female teachers (11% of the male teachers thought so while only 7.1% of females) and shows a correlation with age as well. (11.8% of teachers in their forties and 9.1% of teachers in their fifties thought they might become a school head as opposed to the 7.1% of teachers in their thirties and 1.7% of teachers in their twenties.) This data show that these promotion possibilities do not significantly differ from the logic of the central salary scale: they are basically connected with age and reward the number of years spent in the profession.

Working conditions and societal esteem

Salaries constitute only one factor among the working conditions of teachers, there are a variety of other factors influencing teachers' working conditions. Among them special attention has to be given to the changes taking place in the constitution of the student body. The demographic and social changes of the 1990s have had a great impact on pupils: today and in the foreseeable future it is not the same kind of children who go to school than in the past. We pointed it out earlier (see Chapter A: The economic and social environment of education) that the number of families that do not raise small children is growing, i.e. an ever growing proportion of pupils arrives from an ever narrowing societal sphere. There are twice as many families raising school-age children of Gypsy ethnicity than in the whole of the population, and this rate is growing. The number of big families with many children is also growing. The number of children coming from families with the lowest incomes is on the rise, too. So teachers for the past few years have had to face the fact that some of the children they teach are becoming poorer. These changes do not only affect the internal life of schools or the environment of teaching but also the working conditions of teachers.

It is an important condition of the teachers professional work how much the social environment esteems their work and whether teachers have the proper self-esteem. Prestige studies have shown that Hungarian society makes an articulate difference between the various groups of teachers but the teaching profession as a whole is given rather low esteem. It is also a finding that the gap between the financial rewards and the esteem of the profession is extremely wide. In a survey among the adult population in December 1996 secondary school teachers came 6^th, general school teachers came 7^th, and kindergarten teachers came 10^th out of 11 professions in a ranking of societal esteem. As far as the financial rewards are concerned teachers are in an even worse situation: secondary school teachers came 7^th out of 11 professions. The gap between society's esteem and the financial rewards of the professions is biggest in the case of teachers: it is them who are perceived by the general public as being most underpaid (see Figure 2). Teachers themselves find their own profession of even a lower esteem than the whole population: they rank the profession of priests higher than the profession of secondary school teachers, which is of the highest esteem within the teaching profession.

Figure 2
Public opinion split on the societal esteem and financial rewards of various professions (differences in rank positions), 1996

---

---

Source: Marián, 1997a.
The questions asked: (1) “Please rank the following professions according to their esteem by society." (2) “Now please rank these professions according to the income people can make by practising them".

The teachers' vision of their future seems to be influenced by three determining factors: their gender, their age, and the extent to which they like their profession. (The latter shows a strong correlation with the gender of the given teacher: 90.5% of female teachers love their profession as compared to only 82.7% of the males.) While 73.4% of male teachers think that they will be teaching at their current school, 77.4% of females think so. Males and females differ in the way they envisage their future at their school: as we have seen, almost every tenth teacher thinks that they may become a school head within five years. Among the youngest teachers the proportion of those who think they may become a school head is extremely low. Only 1% of the teachers are afraid of becoming unemployed (slightly more in Budapest and slightly less in the villages), and only 7.8% of teachers plan to abandon their teaching career. The life strategies of those considering leaving their current school show differences according to their gender: females would rather stay in education (they think of another school or another position within education) while the males in this group consider leaving the teaching career behind for good. The option of leaving the current school or the career behind fades - in direct proportion - with an advance in age.

It is well-known that the work of teachers is not limited to preparation and the delivery of lessons. According to the teacher survey quoted several times - besides teaching activities - 33.8% of teachers take part in the development of the local system of evaluation, and 33.1% take part in the preparation of the local curricula and pedagogical programme. 16.4% of teachers belong to a professional organisation, 14.6% of them give presentations on a regular basis, 7% of them work as educational consultants or experts, 6.9% publish their work, 4.3% are listed in the register of examiners, and 3.2% are listed in the experts register. Taking or not taking part in these professional activities is basically determined by the age of teachers. For example, 38.4% of the 40-49-year-old teachers and 37.4% of 50-59-year-old teachers participate in the preparation of the local curricula, while only 19.1% of teachers in their twenties do so.

1.2. The initial and in-service training of teachers

Changes in teacher education

There are five major types of teacher education institutions in Hungary (college for pre-school teachers, college for primary school teachers, teacher education college for general school subject teachers, college of special education, and university faculties of humanities and natural sciences). However, vocational teachers are trained at a variety of other colleges and universities, too, and there are separate institutions to train the teachers of physical education. Out of the 90 higher educational institutions of Hungary 53 carry out some sort of teacher education.

There was a strong increase in enrolments in teacher education at the beginning of the 1990s but all in all it remained below the rate of the whole of higher education. After 1994, however, the expansion of teacher education slowed a little. It was probably in 1995 that students entering higher education could sense that public education could no longer offer job security and acceptable levels of income as it could before. Within the whole of teacher education expansion was stronger in the university sector than in the college sector. The latter even saw declining enrolments in some years (see Figure 3).

Figure 3
Changes in admission numbers in higher educational institutions where teacher education is also carried out, 1988-1997 (1988 = 100%)

---

---

Source: Neuwirth, 1997.

Besides full-time teacher education the proportion of part-time education (correspondence and evening courses) is significant, too. (According to a teacher survey of 1997, about one quarter of the teachers active today obtained their qualifications in part-time teacher education.) At the end of the 1980s almost half of all part-time students were in teacher education. It is a favourable development concerning the quality of training that this proportion shows a diminishing tendency, though in absolute numbers there are more part-time students nowadays than formerly.

There have been manifold reasons to account for the expansion of higher education - and within this in teacher education - since the change of the regime. Expansion is an expression of society's demands for higher education that used to be artificially suppressed by the social and educational policies of the previous regime. Another driving force of the expansion is the wish to survive and expand on behalf of the training institutions themselves, which was further enhanced by the growing autonomy of the institutions. Another reason for expansion is the widening of educational choice. In teacher education, for example, there is training carried out in private institutions and the role of church-maintained institutions has also risen (there is Catholic and Protestant teacher education at the university level, Catholic general school subject teacher education at college level, and primary school teacher education both in Catholic and Protestant colleges).

Expansion is in an obvious contradiction with the narrowing possibilities of finding a job in teaching. Those involved in teacher education (lecturers and students) and the administrators of the national educational policy most probably sense this paradox. Yet, higher education, and especially teacher education, in Hungary is more and more seen as a means of addressing youth unemployment. However costly in the short run it may gain a return in the long run. (A similar phenomenon can be observed in the other Central European regions: despite the increasing difficulties of finding a teaching job the number of students in teacher education is growing.) Participation in teacher education may prove a worthwhile investment both for the students and for the state if the training institutions provide marketable knowledge which can be utilised outside the school system as well.

The whole of teacher education can be characterised by the phrase “trying to find its way". The past few years have seen so many changes that the situation is very difficult to review. This partly stems from the fragmentation of the field, from the great variety of institutional interests, and partly from the growing institutional autonomy and from the strategies of the institutions, which tend to compete rather than co-operate. The direction of the changes is determined by a large number of factors, such as the government-level guidelines and regulations issued, the domestic and international networking of the individual institutions and their capacity for financial manoeuvring, the restructuring of public education and a variety of other ad hoc factors. The following changes are worth highlighting.

There is a general attempt to raise the length and level of training. The teachers of all levels of schooling in Hungary are trained in higher education today. There is a governmental plan to raise the length of teacher education to a unified five years. This can be carried out if the college level courses go through accreditation, if the colleges enter into integration with the universities, or if the higher educational institutions of a city or a region enter into associations/alliances. The 1993 Act on Public Education - in accordance with the structural changes of the education system - allowed the employment of primary teachers in grades 5 and 6 of the general school if they had undergone specific training. This development did not surprise the colleges of primary teacher education where there had been a possibility from 1976 on to supplement the basic training of primary school teachers with an additional course the completion of which entitled primary school teachers to do subject teaching in the transitional phase (grades 4 and 5) of the general school. In the case of certain courses (foreign language primary teacher, primary teacher of minority education, primary teacher-librarian, primary teacher-cultural organiser, primary teacher-social pedagogue, primary and pre-school teacher) it has been a practice for some time that the education of primary school teachers lasts 4 years. (Some one-third of the students in these colleges received four-year-long training at the middle of the 1990s.)

One of the most significant changes of the past few years has been the unified regulation of qualification requirements for teachers. After years of professional and political preparation the governmental decree that contained the qualification requirements valid for teaching in grades 5-12 (13) was issued in spring 1997⁴. According to the new regulations the minimum number of lessons to take in teacher education is 600, divided into three main sections: general pedagogy and theoretical psychology (minimum 330 lessons), methodology and subject methodology (minimum 120 lessons), and school-based teaching practice (minimum 150 lessons). The formulation of the qualification requirements can contribute to the strengthening of the professional character of the teaching vocation and, in the long run, can help the development of a credit system that would allow international comparison as well.

The introduction of new specialisations or courses highlights the current strategy of content modernisation. Between 1993 and 1996 the Ministry of Culture and Education received about a hundred applications with the request to found and launch a new specialisation, half of which came from the field of teacher education. These applications express the diversification of training and the development of new orientations that reflect the demands of society. Such specialisations or courses are: talent developer, higher educational student counsellor, teacher of motion picture and media culture, pedagogue of health development and mental hygiene, teacher of social studies, career and learning counsellor, teacher of career orientation, and so on.

The development of teacher in-service training

The changes in the field of education have challenged the system of teacher in-service training (inset) most. As opposed to initial teacher education, which enjoys a high degree of autonomy, is more bound by traditions, and lasts longer, in-service training can respond faster to the changing expectations. This was why it is in this field that the educational governments have initiated the most institutional changes with the aim of improving the effectiveness of education. Also, attention has been directed to the need to retrain those already in service by the narrowing of the teaching labour market, and there have appeared a lot of interests in the possibilities of inset, on the part of the business sector (of foreign companies and institutions as well).

Before the change of the political regime teacher in-service training was basically carried out under the aegis of the county pedagogical institutes (see below) whose network has adjusted more easily to the new, service-type expectations since the political changes. The inset choice offered by the teacher education institutions has grown and new agents (professional organisations, foundations, private companies) have appeared with their offers in the market of inset. The churches have also started to take part in inset to train the teachers of their own institutions.

From the demand side, the expansion of this sphere is fuelled by the needs connected with the transformation of the public education system. New needs have arisen due to the tasks related to the implementation of the National Core Curriculum: local curricula and pedagogical programmes have to be developed, new subjects have been introduced. There is a general demand to revise methodologies, and teachers have to act out new roles. Furthermore, competencies are required from teachers that did not use to be known or demanded formerly: competencies and capacities of conflict resolution, effective communication, dealing more effectively with disadvantaged pupils, nurturing of talents, and there are new competencies required for curriculum development, examination expertise, institutional assessment or for the new tasks of school management.

Governmental policy at the middle of the decade considered teacher in-service training the most important means to revitalise the teaching profession and through this the means of modernising the whole of public education. This intention materialised in the decree that made professional examinations compulsory - a measure rather unusual in European practice -, and in the ruling of the Public Education Act that 3% of the total educational budget should be devoted to the preparation of teachers for professional examinations and to their re-training. It has been mentioned that compulsory in-service training is also a means of teachers' being promoted. One of the most developed fields of the implementation strategy of the National Core Curriculum in 1995 was also the system of teacher in-service training. One of the starting points of the strategy was that the central budgetary support should reach the users of the inset services in the shortest possible way, with the fewest number of mediators. As a result the grants meant for the support of in-service training were not given as earmarked grants to the organisers of courses but to the participating teachers and their schools.

The training provision responded fairly fast to the extraordinary growth of demand. In 1997 the Ministry of Culture and Education carried out a comprehensive survey of the organisations that planned to appear on the supply market and of the training programmes they were offering. Altogether 627 training sites were registered in 1997, more than half of which were higher educational institutions or their organisational units. The second biggest group of suppliers (91 training sites) consisted of economic organisations, mainly private companies operating on a market basis. Similar size groups were constituted by the pedagogical service institutions, by the public education institutions that volunteered for inset, and by the professional organisations. There was a smaller group of foundations. There were 4887 in-service training programmes offered for applicants by these training sites together.

As far as the content of the training provision is concerned, subject and methodology training forms are a decisive majority (over 90%). Some two-thirds of the courses offered by the trainers are shorter courses, between 30 and 60 hours long, but almost every tenth is longer than 360 hours. Less than 5% of the courses lead to a new basic degree or to a postgraduate degree. The majority of the courses aid in the acquisition of certificates which may only contribute to the professional examinations when the examinations themselves are accredited.

The courses organised and financed by the National Institute of Public Education (OKI) played an outstanding role during the course of 1996 in the preparation of teachers for the tasks connected with the implementation of the NCC. These programmes focused on the training of teachers and school heads who were to develop the local curricula and the pedagogical programmes and on the experts and maintainers involved in the adoption of these documents. The three-day long, small-group-based training courses of OKI on the development of the local curricula concentrated on the most practical elements of necessary knowledge and on the skills development of the participants. 730 teachers gained new competencies by participating in these courses. OKI also carried out the training of 2-3 multiplicators from each county on 4-day courses in order to ensure that there be trained experts in every county of the country who can assist schools in the solution of problems that might arise during the preparation of the local curricula. With the help of the multiplicators trained by OKI more than 10,000 teachers were able to become involved in the preparations for the introduction of the local curricula.

It is much more difficult to obtain data on the total numbers and the proportions of the participants of the courses. According to the 1997 teacher survey almost two-thirds (63.9%) of the teachers asked had taken part in in-service training in the previous five years, mostly (in more than half of the cases) twice or even more times. Participation in inset was higher than the average among general school teachers, among women, and among the middle generations (30-50-year-old teachers). Concerning the themes of the inset courses 22.7% were on individual subjects, 21.4% on pedagogical measurements, 16.9% on personality development, and 4.6% of those asked took part in school management training. One-third of the courses (34.3%) were shorter than 30 hours. Most courses were financed by the schools (34%), 8.5% of the teachers paid themselves, and about the same proportion of the courses were free. Satisfaction with the training programmes was surveyed with a five-point scale and the various courses received a fairly high grade, 4 on average. To the question whether they intended to take part in organised inset programmes in the future the majority of those asked (61.1%) answered with yes.

The fast expansion of in-service training raises a lot of questions, especially concerning the quality assurance and the financing of the programmes. In November 1995 the National Office of In-service Training was opened in Veszprém under the aegis of the National Institute of Public Education (OKI) with the assistance of Austrian, German and Swiss experts. The tasks of this Office are to co-ordinate between the institutions carrying out inset, to motivate for and support inset, to operate the information system and the databank that contains the full supply of inset programmes, and to organise the exchange of domestic and international programmes. Following the 1996 Amendment to the Public Education Act the National Teacher In-Service Training Accreditation Committee was set up within the National Public Educational Council to assure the quality of the programmes that appear on the training market. In the future only those training programmes that are accredited by the Committee will be allowed to contribute to the preparation for the professional examinations, and only the accredited programmes may be financed from the grants earmarked for in-service training.

As the decisions concerning the use of the grants earmarked for inset are to be made at the level of schools school heads and staffs have to face new challenges. Hitherto unknown possibilities open up for them because they can use the grants for the types of training their institution needs most. However, they also have to formulate a list of priorities which is not an easy task for a lot of schools. It is also a difficulty that decisions may have to be made without having enough information on the contents and the quality of the training programmes. Help in this respect may come from the information brochures that introduce the market of courses and that are partly accessible via modern electronic means.

2. Pedagogical services

Important roles are played in the system of public educational administration by the institutions of pedagogical-professional services. These institutions play a special role in carrying out the tasks of public educational assessment, the operation of the information system, and the facilitation of the process of contents modernisation. Pedagogical-professional services can be provided by any institution but the Public Education Act makes the provision of these services a compulsory task of the county governments. As a consequence the pedagogical institutes maintained by the county governments carry a special weight in the provision of pedagogical services. Services are also provided by the national institutes of educational research and development, by smaller institutes operating in towns or in districts of the capital, and increasingly by private organisations.

The national institutes of educational research and development

The Institute of Educational Research (OI), the National Institute of Public Education (OKI), and the National Service Office of Public Education (OKSZI) are under the control of the Ministry of Education. The Institute of Educational Research (OI) carries out research in all fields of the education system including higher and vocational education. The National Institute of Public Education (OKI) concentrates on the tasks connected with the implementation of the National Core Curriculum, the development of the examination system, the in-service training of teachers, the assessment and measurement tasks of public education, and it also carries out research in the field of public education. The National Service Office of Public Education takes a direct part in the operation of the system of school leaving examinations, in the organisation of national study competitions, and in the organisation of other tasks concerning the teaching of individual subjects. The National Institute of Vocational Education (NSZI) is responsible for the maintenance of the National Training Register and for the developmental work connected with it, and it carries out research in the field of vocational education.

The county pedagogical institutes

The traditional institutional system of the pedagogical services that directly serve the work of schools is the system of the county (and Budapest) pedagogical institutes with units in the 19 counties and in the capital. At the beginning of the 1990s these institutes underwent a critical period both from organisational and from financial aspects. Due to the fiscal restrictions and to the uncertainties of the central administration concerning the role of these institutes the number of the personnel and the infrastructure was kept at a minimum in most counties. In the middle of the decade their situation was stabilising but by that time huge differences had developed between the counties with respect to the conditions of professional development and access to information. In 1997 there was a pedagogical institute in 18 counties and in the capital. In one county the institute was reorganised in the form of an economic organisation to serve public purposes. The county pedagogical institutes - besides offering the traditional pedagogical services - may fulfil other tasks as well (e.g. career orientation and educational advisory services, cultural tasks, etc.). The institutes are financially supported by the central budget, by the local governmental budget, and have their own incomes. The proportion of their own incomes varies greatly from county to county: in 1996 it was between 7% and 40%.

A field of outstanding importance among the pedagogical professional services is professional counselling. In the 1980s the educational inspectorate was abolished, a unique measure in Europe, and its counselling role was allocated to the county pedagogical institutes. According to the Public Education Act, the main function of the professional counselling service is to disseminate the methods and methodologies of education. The ministerial decree⁵ that further regulates the field lists the following tasks: assistance in the preparation of the regulatory documents of schools (pedagogical programmes, local curricula, rules of the school), assistance in pedagogical development, in the selection of textbooks and teaching aids, the assessment of these documents and activities, and professional counselling for individual teachers. Similarly to other services professional counselling operates according to the demands of the customers. There is no legal regulation in force to regulate the conditions of service provision, so the scope of the services, the number of experts employed, the conditions of operation and the fees charged depend on the decisions of the pedagogical institute running the service.

The other determining field of importance among the pedagogical professional services is teachers in-service training (see above). In 1996 there were 1649 inset programmes organised and facilitated by the 20 county (and Budapest) pedagogical institutes. 31% of these courses were longer than 30 hours. The county pedagogical institutes play an outstanding role among all inset providers of the country in the organisation of courses shorter than 30 hours, which can respond to the arising demands fast and in a flexible way. In 1996 the main aim of the in-service training programmes was to assist the implementation of the National Core Curriculum. 18 of the 20 institutes have run school management training programmes, and the training programmes of personality development are becoming increasingly popular.

There are regional and national seminars and conferences organised by the county pedagogical institutes. All of them publish their own monthly publications (newsletters, information brochures, etc.), which have an important role in disseminating professional information. The newsletters inform the schools about professional programmes, study competitions and application possibilities and often have the pedagogical institute's monthly events calendar as a supplement. Eight of the pedagogical institutes publish their own pedagogical periodicals, most of which are published every half a year or a quarter but some are monthlies. They provide good publication opportunities for teachers involved in creative development. Brochures that serve the career orientation of pupils are published in 6 counties. Besides these regular publications, a large number of circulars, methodological recommendations, competition calendars and other printed materials are received by the schools and the teachers from the pedagogical institutes.

Except for one institute, all have their own specialised pedagogical libraries. 18 of the institutes have a separate textbook showroom. The tools of modern computer technology and telecommunications play an ever increasing role in the dissemination of information. The facilities and the activities of the county pedagogical institutes are important assets in the development of public educational informatics. In 1996 a public educational informatics office was opened in each of the county pedagogical institutes with the financial and professional help of the Ministry of Culture and Education, the Soros Foundation, and the National Institute of Public Education.

The number of various study competitions - at the county, regional and national levels - that serve the nurturing of talents has grown rapidly in the past few years. More and more services are oriented towards the needs of the local governments. The county pedagogical institutes are active in networking, which allows them to join in research and developmental activities and in programmes based on international cooperation.