More than 170 teachers from the Teach for Bulgaria Program will start teaching during the new school year in ten regions of the country. 120 of them will enter the classrooms for the first time, and will be part of the biggest cohort of the organization so far.

Together with their colleagues spending their second year of the program, they will be teaching students from various places in the regions of Vratsa, Lovech, Montana, Pazardzhik, Pernik, Plovdiv, Razgrad, Sofia City, Sofia Region and Stara Zagora. The teachers will be working in more than 80 schools for 2016/2017 school year, teaching various subjects. The teachers of foreign languages and the primary teachers are biggest in number.

TFB’s mission is to select and train prominent and capable professionals with a various profile to join the education field. For two years, they will be supported by the organization to work in schools with many students in a disadvantaged position, which is a way to overcome inequality in education actively.

Every year, TFB is broadening the scope of its work, adding new regions with teachers, parents, institutional and corporate partners who are open to innovations and are constantly looking for ways to make school and education better and more useful. The new school year will welcome Montana and Vratsa, where, in 8 towns and villages, nine new teachers of Teach for Bulgaria will be working.

 “We believe that the TFB’s teachers joining the new regions of Montana and Vratsa will help the young people from that part of the country to become more motivated to study, apply and develop the skills they learn at school. Our experience from previous years and working with other regions of the country make us confident that with the support from our whole team, the partner schools, local community and institutions, the teachers from Teach for Bulgaria will be able to achieve a quality change in the students’ outcomes, which is of key importance for the development of the regions. Equal access to quality education is one of the most important factors for achieving sustainable economic growth,” says Evgenia Peeva, the CEO of Teach for Bulgaria.

70 of the new teachers in the program will be trained thanks to two innovative master’s programs for obtaining a professional teaching qualification. The programs are being implemented in partnership with Teach for Bulgaria, the Ministry of Education and Science and Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv. The masters’ programs are part of a big international project co-funded by the European Commission under Erasmus+ Program and America for Bulgaria Foundation.

The project aims to attract and train as teachers experts from various fields who are not qualified to teach or have a limited previous experience in teaching.

The experience gained thanks to those pilot programs will be used to make recommendations for national and European policies concerning the attraction, training, development and retaining of new experts in the field of education.