Sharp for education unions: ‘Taking action to honor a lost past rarely produces good solutions’

Teaching is a fantastic profession. It requires great expertise and commitment. You cannot be a good teacher without giving your all to the development of the young people entrusted to you. Teaching requires a large dose of social commitment, especially for students who need some extra support. It’s not a 9-to-5 job, because your work doesn’t stop when you leave the classroom. But it is also a job where you get a lot in return. Your students come first, especially when you see them beaming when they have taken another step forward.

The profession has not become easier in recent years. The workload has increased due to various factors. More than ever before, all problems in society enter the classroom, often in a harsh and confrontational way. Apparently it is expected that teachers can solve all these problems, even where parents and social institutions fail.

Many parents have great appreciation for their children’s teachers, but – as is unfortunately the case with other positions of authority – there is also a growing group that questions the authority of the teacher. And although many Flemish people still consider education very important, social appreciation for the teaching profession has gradually diminished in recent decades.

Dark clouds are therefore gathering over the teaching profession and have affected the self-confidence and motivation of teachers. The finding that despite the great amount of work and dedication, education as a whole has ended up in a downward quality dynamic also does not do any good to the professional honor of teachers.

Schools no longer manage to find enough teachers for all classes, depriving too many students of their right to quality education. Many teachers are doing their utmost to avoid the negative consequences of the teacher shortage as much as possible and to continue to provide all students with the best possible education, but they are increasingly encountering limits.

Teachers expect policy makers to find solutions to these problems and show the way that the profession can lead to a better future. Unfortunately, governments and social partners have not been able to provide this perspective in recent years. Due to many missed opportunities, the problems have only increased.

Wrong opponent

So I sincerely understand the concerns and dissatisfaction of teachers who are taking action. However, the actions of a number of trade unions are directed against the wrong perceived opponent. It is quite special that action is being taken against a report with recommendations drawn up by a committee of scientists, management and teachers who have each worked together based on their own expertise to modernize and revaluate the teaching profession. After all, the ‘Committee of Wise Men’ recognizes many of the concerns that teachers have today, but instead of sticking with the status quo, it has taken up the challenge to develop concrete solutions. Governments and social partners have thrown down that challenge in recent years.

I will give three important examples. For example, there is the major bottleneck of starting teachers. The current rules, which oblige starting teachers to collect vacant ‘hours’, sometimes in multiple schools, make it very difficult for young professionals. Without much guidance, they are often thrown into the most difficult classes. What they have learned in teacher training is often inadequate to survive in those challenging circumstances and to learn the finer points of the profession in the workplace.

The Commission advocates a completely different approach, with guaranteed recruitment for a full school year and a paid induction year that offers the opportunity to master the job in the workplace with good guidance from experienced teachers.

Secondly, the Commission wants to tackle the many-headed monster of the teacher shortage by making far-reaching cuts in all kinds of rules. Flanders has a sufficiently large number of teachers, so the problem is not one of a quantitative shortage of teachers, but of efficiency in the way teachers are deployed. Many other sectors have benefited from modern personnel policy and human resources management, but education still believes that it can solve these problems in the same way for everyone by coming up with rules.

Due to this urge to regulate, a lot of time and energy, which could be better spent on more meaningful tasks, is lost on administration. It is wrong to think that education can be organized at a high level of quality and with greater efficiency through a tsunami of rules that must be applied in the same way by every school. Schools are too different for that.

More efficient system

That is precisely why the Commission advocates abolishing the current system of certificates of competence. The rules that determine which teacher may teach which subject have become so administratively complex that they are no longer applicable. The system causes enormous loss of time and planning burden. This does not in any way mean that the Commission, as is sometimes claimed, no longer considers the competence of teachers to be crucial; the opposite is true.

Precisely because we consider the professional competence of teachers so important, we advocate a much more efficient system. Every teacher must possess a pedagogical certificate of competence, which is the core of professional competence. Subject-specific and subject-didactic competencies are absolutely necessary. But does it make sense to define those competencies in a bureaucratic way? Perhaps no longer judge them solely on the basis of a diploma, but let the competencies of teachers, as in recruitment procedures in so many other sectors, be assessed where the job has to be performed, namely at the school.

The teacher’s diploma will still be the most important, but perhaps not the only element in the teacher’s portfolio. In a lifelong learning perspective, you must be able to assess people’s competencies in a richer way.

And thirdly, the Commission wants to see all the tasks that teachers perform today recognized and valued. This can be done by separating the assignment of each teacher from the number of contact hours and defining the assignment, as for almost all working people, in a 38-hour working week. This immediately makes it clear to society that in addition to contact education, which of course remains the core, teachers also take on many other tasks.

Naturally, the Commission does not want all these tasks to be done at school from now on. The professional autonomy of the teacher and a work-life balance that many professions envy are important assets of the profession. But it is desirable that good agreements are made within teacher teams and with the school management. After all, teamwork is becoming increasingly important.

More differentiation and specialization during the career also becomes possible. Today there are already several schools in Flanders that work on the basis of these principles and the experiences in those schools are very positive for everyone involved. There is a lot to be gained for everyone through a simpler and more efficient school organization.

Courage and imagination

These are just a few examples of the proposals that the Commission has developed in its report. These proposals were not developed in a vacuum, but are based on scientific research, foreign examples and the practical experiences of teachers. They require some courage and imagination from all educational partners to step outside the existing regulatory and statutory frameworks.

To think that we can solve today’s problems with the legal status regulations that were designed more than thirty years ago in a completely different context – a context of teacher surplus and unemployment instead of teacher shortage and labor shortage – is an illusion. Taking action to honor a lost past rarely produces good solutions. It makes much more sense to look for the best solutions together in a future-oriented manner. Social partners are an indispensable partner in this. But the educational field expects them to step over their own shadows in this conversation.