Most EU Member States see a large proportion of their teaching vacancies go unfilled at the start of each school year, often due to low salaries, high workloads and aging teachers.
With the start of the school year, 24 Member States of the European Union (EU) face a shortage of teachers, which impacts student learning and hinders the goal of providing a quality education for everyone.
Sweden is one of the most affectedwith 153,000 qualified teachers by 2035.
Only Croatia and Cyprus did not report a shortage of teaching staff, according to the 2023 report ‘Education and Training Observatory’ of the European Commission. Greece’s public data do not allow us to assess whether needs are covered or whether certain subjects could suffer from shortages.
Most countries with teacher shortages need teachers specifically in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and qualified personnel in early childhood education and care.
The German Educational and Scientific Workers’ Union (GEW) has warned “against reducing levels of pedagogical qualifications to compensate for staff shortages“. But why is this problem so serious and how has it spread throughout the EU?
What are the obstacles?
The teaching profession suffers from several problems, including low wagesjob insecurity and high workload.
Gauthier Catteau was a geography teacher in the French-speaking part of Belgium. He began his teaching career when he was 22 years old. When he turned 29, Catteau stopped being a teacher and switched to engineering. Before that, he once met teaching 39 teenagers.
“I spent three hours a day going to and from school because I live in the country,” he explains. “And I chose to work in Brussels because it gave me a certain security.” The distance to work, high workload and limited career prospects They began to seem incompatible with his desire to start a family. In 2021, only the 8% of the total teaching staff were under 30 years oldaccording to ‘Eurostat’.
The integration of Ukrainian children into EU schools Due to the war it has also aggravated the problem of teacher shortage. In Poland, 43,800 children displaced from Ukraine were enrolled in early childhood education as of February 2023.
Meanwhile, many countries are suffering from aging of the teaching populationwith a wave of retirements expected in the coming years, which will only add more pressure to the system.
In Portugal, one of the teachers’ unions, Fenprof, estimates that between 4,700 and 4,800 teachers will retire, “the highest figure of the millennium”. The country will need more than 30,000 new professional educators by 2030.
An EU-wide solution?
The European Commission has promoted the mobility of teachers and rewarded innovative teaching practices as a way to address this shortage and restore prestige to this profession.
Many EU countries have also tried attract retired teachers backand fill the gaps with teachers with temporary contracts as a patch.
In April this year, the General Secretary of ASTI, the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland, Kieran Christie, stated that the Ministry of Education needed a “total change of mentality” to address the current teacher shortage. Christie suggested the need to launch a series of initiatives to encourage the return of teachers who have left Ireland to work abroad.
However, an EU-wide solution could be difficult to implement.
ADVERTISING“One of the reasons why it is difficult to develop a European indicator on teacher shortages is that Countries have different educational institutional norms“wrote education economist Giorgio Di Pietro in a white paper for the EU Joint Research Centre.
“For example, formal teaching qualifications can be obtained in different ways in different countries. In some, one automatically becomes a teacher when completing the training programme. teacher preparationwhile in others you have to complete additional steps.
