In North Rhine-Westphalia, the school semester ends today, Friday. On the occasion of this date, the Education and Science Union (GEW) in North Rhine-Westphalia is sounding the alarm. The shortage of teachers is glaring, and the measures proposed by the Ministry of Education to counter this are inadequate. To relieve teachers urges the GEW therefore also ensure that specialists are hired for the IT support of the schools. Teachers often take over the IT support at schools, but are usually hardly relieved for this.
It has been known for a long time that schools in Germany – not only in North Rhine-Westphalia – have difficulties in guaranteeing the provision of lessons due to the existing shortage of teachers. In the summer of 2022, however, the Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK) also put the topic back on the list of urgencies, after it had been dealing with corona policy and its effects on school education since 2020.
Foreseeably, the federal states ran into a massive shortage of teachers, it said there. The then KMK President Karin Prien (CDU) already explained at this point that the shortage of teachers could also require more use of technology. In any case, she called for a “debate without taboos”: For example, it must also be checked who has to perform which task in the schools – multi-professionalism is a possibility that must be checked.
Free up teachers for core tasks
The GEW is now clearly opposed to this demand. Teachers are already overburdened anyway, which makes the teaching profession unattractive for many students. The state government in NRW must “with a real attractiveness offensive ensure that more people decide to become teachers and that teachers are prevented from leaving. To do this, working conditions must be fundamentally improved – above all, the system must finally be relieved. Good Working conditions and measures that relieve the teachers on site are the best advertising!”, says Ayla Çelik, Chairwoman of GEW NRW. Specifically, the union proposes reducing class tests and streamlining curricula. In addition, “support from school administration assistants and IT support” is also called for.
Instead of teachers expanding their range of tasks and teaching to become more multi-professional in the future, there is a call for multi-professional teams and additional employees, as has long been the rule in other European countries.
Use of digital means and advertising
In order to counter the shortage of teachers, other federal states are also discussing what needs to be done. For example, the Thuringian Minister of Education is considering offering digitally supported hybrid lessons where schools lack special teachers. Pupils from several schools could then take part in a physics lesson in another school that still has physics teachers.
In other federal states, efforts are being made to hire more interested career changers or lateral entrants. Saxony-Anhalt even invites you to virtual speed dating. At the beginning of January, the newly elected new state and federal chairman of the Association for Education and Training (VBE) in Baden-Württemberg, Gerhard Brand, made it clear that lateral entrants are not an ideal solution for the teachers’ unions. Side risers could be used to “bring people to the school relatively quickly”, but that would not do justice to the profession. “But given the precarious situation, we have to jump over the shadows. It won’t work any other way if we don’t want to drive the cart into the porridge.”
Mark Söder, Prime Minister of Bavaria, recently announced that he wanted to poach teachers from other federal states – After all, salaries in Bavaria are often better. There are also some political demands that teachers should no longer be allowed to work part-time in the current situation. But this requirement has about Minister of Education Simone Oldenburg (Die Linke) in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has just given a rejection. Rather, it relies on assurances that older teachers, for example, can also hope for more relief.
How should digitization be implemented in our schools? How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting what is happening? What was achieved in the 2020/2021 school year – what happened next in 2021/2022? This is what our series of articles aims to shed light on.
(kbe)
