Another non-teacher armchair commenter who has never done 7 hours straight in classrooms of 40 rowdy kids. It is very easy to take the total student population in a school, divided by the total number of teachers, and get a sweet number between 11 to 13. Wow! One teacher only 12 students! ********. That number assumes that every single teacher is in the classroom for the entirety of school hours, non-stop, with no breaks and no time to do planning/marking within working hours.

Before the school mergers etc, we are working pretty much at capacity. As candidature shrinks, we continue to work close to capacity because of all the extra **** that comes up. Honestly? It is fine. Every job is tough and demanding. None of us are saying that teachers have it worse than other people. But phrases like "excess teachers" - coming from the MOE itself, no less - makes it sound like they almost begrudgingly keep us employed and we eat snake everyday.

The issue raised is about the above. Why even bring in private sector? Yes they are facing issues now, but you derailed the topic.