The salaries of teachers will go up by 10% starting from September 1, but this can’t have an essential impact on the work of teachers and the quality of their services. This is what Project Coordinator of the Bureau for Employment Rights Protection of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation-Dashnaktsutyun political party, economist Tadevos Avetisyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am.

“There are 38,000 teachers in Armenia, and their average salary is lower than the minimum consumer basket per person. So, what we have is a situation where most teachers with no other revenue are classified as poverty-stricken workers,” he said.

Touching upon the statement by Minister of Education Arayik Harutyunyan who said fake news websites are spreading information according to which the government is laying off school employees to increase the salary by 10%, the economist said the following:

“It’s not the fake news websites, but the official statistics according to which the number of employees in the education sector has dropped by 3-4% based on the data for this semester, and of course, there are teachers among those employees. Laying off teachers is on the government’s agenda.”

According to Avetisyan, even though layoffs might be justified from the perspective of efficiency, objective factors need to be taken into consideration.

He added that the government needs to raise teachers’ salaries to a great extent as soon as possible so that the outcome is clear to see. In addition, he believes the government needs to make changes in the policy on allocating funds to schools based on the number of schoolchildren so that it has the opportunity to level funding for schools in remote settlements to a certain extent.