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Wanted: tens of thousands of teachers to staff Europe’s schools

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Schools across Europe are facing a staffing crisis, with authorities cutting learning hours, increasing class sizes and lowering recruitment standards as they struggle to fill tens of thousands of vacant teaching posts at the start of the new academic year, an FT analysis shows.

Teaching unions warn that low pay and burnout caused by a range of factors, including fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic and stringent government oversight, are prompting thousands of staff to retire early or quit. Meanwhile, the profession is struggling to attract new entrants.

In five countries alone — Germany, Hungary, Poland, Austria and France — more than 80,000 teaching positions remain unfilled, according to government and teaching union estimates. Unions warn education quality will be eroded as a result.

Europe’s schools are also providing classes for large numbers of students whose families have fled the war in Ukraine, adding to the demand on resources. Poland alone expects as many as 400,000 Ukrainian children to join its schools in the new academic year, the government estimates.

In France, more than 4,000 of 27,300 new posts remain unfilled, the education ministry says. Starting salaries for primary schoolteachers rank 20th across the 38-member OECD club of industrialised nations. President Emmanuel Macron has pledged a pay rise of around 10 per cent to ensure a minimum entry-level net salary of €2,000 a month, a measure that would need parliamentary approval.

The country has recruited and accelerated training for 3,000 contract teachers, mainly temporary staff who do not hold France’s nationally accredited teaching qualification. Pap Ndiaye, education minister, pledged earlier this week that there would be “a teacher in front of every class” by the start of the school year.

In Germany, where unions estimate the country has a shortage of up to 40,000 teachers in a total workforce of 800,000, education union Erziehung und Wissenschaft (GEW) warned last month of an emergency in schools, which are filling vacancies with staff who are not fully trained. In the city of Gelsenkirchen, lessons have been cut by an hour a week in all primary schools because of staff shortages.

Udo Beckman, head of the VBE teachers’ association, said: “Lessons are being cancelled right at the start of the school year, classes are bigger, support for special needs is being slashed, the school timetable is being shortened.”

Italy’s education ministry announced in July it was hiring 94,000 teachers over the summer. However, unions warned only that half had been recruited by the start of term.

Meanwhile, Austrian authorities estimate the country has a shortfall of up to 1,500 teachers, with too few new staff hired over the past decade.

Even Finland, regularly lauded by the OECD as one of the best-performing school systems in the world, is experiencing shortages. Katarina Murto, chair of the Education Professional Association, a teaching union, warned: “We have a huge lack of qualified teachers in early childhood education . . . [The] reason is low salaries and problems in working conditions.”

Michael Gillespie, general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland, said a combination of part-time contracts and Ireland’s chronic housing shortage was driving many young teachers to move abroad or quit. “We’re hearing of jobs that were advertised over the summer but no one applied,” he said. Schools were having to use teachers from other subjects to cover gaps and to prioritise exam-year classes, he said.

Hungary’s PDSZ teachers’ union estimates there are 16,000 vacancies in the country’s teaching workforce of 117,000, partly because starting salaries are among the lowest in the EU.

Opposition critics and education experts also say the ruling Fidesz party has implemented heavy-handed policies, including a government-mandated school curriculum that they argue overloads students, exerts control over inclusion and diversity teaching, and promotes a nationalist focus.

“Nationalism and patriotism are mandatory ideologies in the curriculum,” Laszlo Miklosi, head of the country’s History Teachers’ Association, told local news website 444.hu. “We should be teaching children critical thinking instead.”

In Poland, the ZNP union estimates the country has a shortfall of 20,000 teachers, with the pressure increased by a surge in student numbers that include Ukrainian refugees. The union is seeking a 20 per cent pay rise for all teachers and threatening strike action.

Ian Hartwright, senior policy adviser at the National Association of Head Teachers in the UK, pointed to surveys showing that 30 per cent of England’s teachers planned to quit within five years of starting their careers.

Hartwright, a governor at a primary school that has undergone three recruitment rounds in an effort to find a new head, said provisional data showed only 22,580 trainee teachers had been recruited in England for 2022-23, against a target of 32,600.

“The leadership pipeline is broken and fractured at all stages. Dissatisfaction is rising because of the impact of the pandemic, a crushing workload, growing accountability and an inspection system in which a poor report is career-ending,” he said.

David Edwards, general secretary of Education International, a global federation of teachers’ unions, said: “Everyone is very concerned about shortages [in Europe and elsewhere]. It’s a real crisis.”

He warned many of the solutions implemented by governments, such as waiving credentials and using unqualified contract teachers, would “exacerbate the problem” by lowering standards. “The poorest kids in neglected communities will suffer most.”

Additional reporting by Guy Chazan in Berlin, Marton Dunai in Budapest, Raphael Minder in Warsaw, Akila Quinio in Paris, Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli in Milan, Sam Jones in Zurich and Jude Webber in Dublin

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