Indian schools short of English, maths and science teachers: TISS

Nearly one in three surveyed schools reported shortages of mathematics and science teachers, according to the executive summary of the State of Teachers, Teaching and Teacher Education for India report for 2025 (SoTTTER 2025). The summary was released on Teachers Day, 5 September 2026, by the Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. The full report is scheduled for October 2026, prepared with the Language and Learning Foundation.

The field survey covered 499 schools across ten states: Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Odisha and Mizoram. Alongside that sample, the summary draws on national datasets including UDISE+ 2024-25 and the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2024-25. SoTTTER 2025 is framed around three policy milestones: 15 years of the Right to Education Act, 2009; ten years of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016; and five years of the National Education Policy, 2020.

Subject gaps, multi-grade rooms and credential mismatch

Among surveyed schools, 35 per cent reported shortages of teachers in mathematics and science. English shortages were reported by 31 per cent, and regional-language shortages by 30 per cent. Specialised teachers for music, arts, physical education and special education remain critically low in the summary findings.

Close to half of government primary schools in the 2025 picture, 48 per cent, operated as multi-grade classrooms, where one teacher handles more than one grade. That share is higher than the 38 per cent recorded in the SoTTTER 2023 cycle. Single-teacher schools have fallen to 7.2 per cent, yet more than 90 per cent of those schools remain in rural areas.

Qualification matching is uneven. Only 51 per cent of mathematics teachers in the survey had studied mathematics at the undergraduate level. Among government primary teachers surveyed, 54 per cent of rural teachers and 47 per cent of all teachers reported a high administrative burden.

Enrolment down, workforce up, urban-rural gender split

The executive summary places school enrolment at 23.2 crore in 2024-25, down from 26.5 crore in 2021-22, a fall of about 3.3 crore over that span as framed in the SoTTTER comparison. In the same period the teaching workforce grew by about six lakh, which the summary says improved average student-teacher ratios even as subject-wise gaps persisted. The summary also flags accelerated privatisation and feminisation of the teaching force.

Women now form 54 per cent of the teaching workforce, up from 51 per cent in the previous SoTTTER cycle. The urban-rural gap is sharp: women account for 67 per cent of urban teachers and 47 per cent of rural teachers.

Recruitment patterns differ by management. About 33 per cent of government schools surveyed reported staffing challenges, with recruitment delays that can stretch to seven or eight years in the principal investigator's account. Private schools recruit faster but reported higher attrition, about 14 per cent overall and 18 per cent in rural private schools. Nearly half of teachers surveyed said the profession is misunderstood and not sufficiently valued.

Prof Padma M. Sarangapani, former chairperson of CETE and principal investigator of the study, now Dean of IMSE at Mahindra University, noted that many aspirants are motivated to teach but are discouraged by weak job security and slow hiring. The executive summary includes recommendations on filling persistent subject shortages; the detailed package is expected with the October 2026 full report.

For schools and state systems, the near-term takeaway from SoTTTER 2025 is practical: subject deployment, multi-grade load and recruitment clocks matter as much as headline pupil-teacher ratios. Readers should treat survey percentages as findings from the 499-school sample and the enrolment and workforce aggregates as framed in the executive summary pending the full report.