Farewell to the “May Decrees”. Why Russia finally abandoned the requirements for average salaries for doctors and teachers

In essence, in 2012, with his decrees, Putin imposed new spending obligations on the regions, but did not provide them with the opportunity to receive additional profits, either from their own tax revenues or from the federal authorities.

The regions solved this problem in the simplest way from the point of view of arithmetic: if the average salary of teachers should increase, but funds for paying them are not added, then staff must be reduced. In this case, a process with the so-called “positive feedback” is launched, that is, it accelerates itself. The reduction of teachers while the number of students increases is an additional burden on the remaining workers. And the higher the workload, the fewer people want to take this position. In 2016, the average workload for a Russian teacher was 1.22 rates, and this was already excessive. At the end of 2024, there was an average of 1.44 rates per teacher. By the beginning of the 2025/2026 academic year, it became even worse: 1.46 rates per teacher, and in large cities - even 1.5.

The outflow of teachers is uneven across regions and types of settlements. If in Russia as a whole, from 2016 to 2024, the number of school teachers decreased by half a percent, then in rural areas - by 9.7%; in cities, on the contrary, their number increased by 5.2%. Of the regions, Mordovia is getting rid of teachers the fastest: their number there has decreased by 17.9%. The staff of teachers in the republics of Bashkortostan and Komi, in the Kirov, Kurgan, Oryol, Pskov, Smolensk, Tambov, Ulyanovsk regions, as well as in the Jewish Autonomous Region and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, decreased by more than 10%.

The Ministry of Education and Science places new obligations on teachers. As the authors of the HSE report note, over the past ten years, the requirements for teachers have expanded significantly. The professional standard “Teacher”, in which they are recorded, is constantly updated, especially as it relates to class teachers. Teachers must not only teach lessons, but also be on duty during breaks, manage classrooms, and participate in state final certification and methodological events. There are also requirements for “implementing an individual approach,” working with parents, educational activities and “innovation,” including digitalization. Even if you do all this at a minimum, just for reporting, there is sorely not enough time. A school teacher sometimes works more than 46 hours a week, of which 15–17 are spent completing plans and reports.

“Teachers, exhausted by an unbearable workload, continue to quit; their places are taken by people from the street whose qualifications at least roughly meet the requirements,” the Teacher trade union comments on this trend.

If we consider specialties, the fastest disappearing teachers are chemistry (10% reduction nationwide over eight years), physics and computer science (6%) teachers. The outflow of middle-aged specialists is especially intense. Over eight years, the share of such teachers decreased from 66.8 to 60.9%. At the same time, compared to the 2016/2017 academic year, the share of teachers under 35 years of age has remained virtually unchanged (from 22.2% to 22.7%). There were 11% of teachers over 60 years old, and the number has increased significantly - 16.4%. In the country as a whole, every sixth school teacher is at retirement or pre-retirement age. In three regions, the share of such teachers exceeds 25% - these are the Pskov and Smolensk regions, as well as Kalmykia.