Bhutan's Teacher Exodus: The Classroom That Emptied Twice

In 2023 Bhutan did something unusually decisive. The civil-service pay revision handed teachers a raise of 55 to 74 percent — the largest in the history of the Bhutanese civil service — and lifted their teaching allowance from 35% to 50% of salary. It was an explicit, expensive answer to a problem everyone could see: teachers were leaving for Australia.

The following year, 1,193 teachers resigned. It was a record. About ninety-nine a month.

That sequence is the most important thing in Bhutanese education policy right now, because it eliminates the comfortable explanation. Whatever is emptying the classrooms, Thimphu cannot outbid it with a salary line — and it just tried, harder than it has ever tried anything.

The first emptying: the teachers

The attrition curve is not a drift. It is a break.

Resignations ran 163 in 2020, then 353, then 478, then 371 — and then 1,193 in 2024. Across 2020–2025 the cumulative arithmetic is what matters: 5,516 teachers resigned; 3,619 were recruited. A net loss of 1,897. The teaching force shrank roughly 10% in eighteen months, reaching 9,484 by mid-2025.

The losses are not evenly spread, which is what turns a staffing number into a classroom problem. Attrition ran worst in higher secondary — around 12.5% — and among female teachers, near 15.8%. Those are the subject specialists and the senior classes. A national pupil-teacher ratio of 15:1 looks comfortable on paper and conceals a physics teacher covering thirty-plus periods a week, multigrade classes in the east, and remote-teaching pilots standing in for people.

The state has not been passive. Allowances up, 86 STEM teachers recruited, 214 postgraduate-diploma deployments scheduled for July 2026, and the Civil Service Commission ending the regular-contract teacher system — a reform that some observers warn may worsen attrition rather than stem it. But the 2023 pay rise is the clean experiment, and it is instructive precisely because it failed. If a 55–74% raise does not hold a teacher, the comparison being made is not Bhutanese-salary-then versus Bhutanese-salary-now. It is what a Bhutanese salary buys against what an Australian one buys — a comparison denominated in a currency Thimphu does not control.

The second emptying: the children

While the staff were leaving the building, the intake was thinning.

Registered births fell from 10,755 in 2021 to 8,182 in 2024 — roughly a quarter, in three years. Total school enrolment is down about 13% from its 2012 peak to 156,272. Forty-two schools have closed since 2020, mostly small rural primaries dropping below viable size, and the system now carries something like 30,000 empty public-school seats. The 13th Plan proposes consolidating 505 schools into 319.

The geography of the loss matters as much as the size. The contraction is rural; the congestion is urban. Thimphu’s enrolment went from 26,103 to 29,895 in a single year while village schools closed. The same movement that empties a Trashigang classroom overfills a Thimphu one — internal migration and emigration are the same impulse at different distances.

And the two emptyings share a cause. The cohort that emigrates is aged roughly 25 to 40. That is the teaching cohort. It is also the cohort that has children. Remove it and a school loses its staff and its future pupils in the same decade, for the same reason.

The compounding, visible in one exam

For fifteen years, Bhutan’s Class XII pass rate sat between 85% and 91%, peaking at 91.55% in 2019. Then it broke to 77.84% in 2025 — the worst in twelve years.

The rate alone understates it, because the cohort was shrinking at the same time, and the two multiply. The number of students who actually passed Class XII went from 11,234 in 2021 to 7,218 in 2025 — down 36% in four years.

That last figure deserves to be read slowly, because it is not an education statistic. It is the annual supply of qualified eighteen-year-olds to everything downstream: the university, the civil-service exam, the hospitals, the banks, the army, the private sector — and Australia. Every institution in Bhutan that recruits young adults is drawing from a pool that has shrunk by more than a third in four years, and most of them have not yet noticed, because their own intakes lag.

The part that hasn’t happened yet

Here is the finding that should shape planning, and it cuts against the panic as much as it feeds it.

The bottom of the funnel has not collapsed yet. Pre-primary intake peaked around 17,300 in 2009–10 and now runs about 11,200–11,900. That is a serious decline, but it is not the birth collapse — because today’s five-year-olds were born around 2018–19, when births were still near 10–11,000.

The 8,182 children born in 2024 reach pre-primary around 2029–30. That is when intake falls toward eight thousand and the closure of forty-two schools starts to look like a first instalment.

Which means the education system is currently absorbing the teacher half of the shock while the pupil half is still in transit — arriving on a schedule already fixed by births that have already happened. Nothing decided in 2026 can change the size of the 2030 intake. It can only change how ready the system is when it arrives.

What this actually is

It is tempting to file all of this under “brain drain” and move on. That framing is too small.

A brain drain is a loss of talent. What Bhutan is running is closer to a structural resizing — a country whose institutions were built for a population shape that is being replaced by a different one, faster than the institutions can be redesigned. The schools were built for 176,000 pupils and hold 156,000. The teacher corps was sized for a system that is shrinking at one end and haemorrhaging at the other. The exam system is certifying a third fewer graduates than it did four years ago.

The government’s headline response is pro-natal — the Third Child Plus Programme, incentives for larger families. Take it at face value and it may work: a child born in 2027 is a worker in 2050. But notice which problem it solves. It does nothing for the 1,897 teachers already gone, nothing for the 42 schools already closed, and nothing for the pass rate that broke last year.

The uncomfortable possibility is that the emptying classroom is not a crisis to be reversed but a fact to be planned around — smaller, more consolidated, better staffed per pupil, honest about the size of the country it serves. That is a harder conversation than a birth incentive, and Bhutan has not yet had it.

The bell still rings at the same hour in every school in the country. In forty-two of them, since 2020, it has stopped ringing altogether.