Students in front of the classroom, a 38-hour week completed in four days: Flemish Minister of Education Ben Weyts (N-VA) has given Brussels Dutch-speaking schools the freedom to experiment with attracting teachers. “Nice, but it should not distract the minister from what he really has to do: improve the status of a teacher.”
Dutch-speaking schools can now experiment with projects to eliminate the teacher shortage. Ben Weyts (N-VA), Flemish Minister of Education, announced this just before Christmas to the various education umbrella organisations, who have been working on their own ideas since this week.
The educational institutions are given carte blanche to test initiatives to attract and retain teachers, says De Standaard, which published the news. These so-called living labs ‘may ignore the existing regulations for a while’, it sounds. What works in practice will subsequently be rolled out in all schools.
It concerns 27 projects in 216 schools: 127 primary schools and 89 schools in secondary education. In Brussels, three school groups are participating in ‘the testing grounds’: school umbrella organization Sint-Goedele, GO! School group and KatOBA (Catholic Education Brussels Annuntiaten).
A-Typical Profiles For The Class
In concrete terms, these are practices that are currently not permitted by current education rules.
For example, KatOBA wants to open up its vacancies more widely, also for less typical profiles. The aim is to offer candidates without a pedagogical background a tailor-made training programme. Experienced teachers then act as mentors for starters and lateral entrants.
Nevertheless, the school umbrella organizations try to keep the number of teachers without a pedagogical competence certificate and the number with a pedagogical competence certificate at one in three. The aim is to allow the first group to obtain the necessary evidence. “This concerns, for example, social workers or speech therapists, who fill the shortfall in the short term and who ensure that certain teaching hours are not lost,” says Bruno De Lille, general manager of Sint-Goedele.
Students in Front of The Class
Sint-Goedele will also look at the benefits of involving students from teacher training as teachers at an early stage. “I am thinking, for example, of students who have completed all their theoretical courses and only have to complete a final test,” says De Lille.
The students would then not have a student job, but would be seen as full-fledged teachers. “We would therefore pay them on that basis, but for a maximum of two school years,” says De Lille.
Bottleneck Subjects
The go! Scholengroep in Brussels is mainly looking for a structural solution for the philosophy of life subjects.
“At the moment, forty percent of the vacancies have not been filled, so forty percent of the students do not get that subject either,” says Pascal Onderdonk, coordinating director of primary education at the Scholengroep Brussel. “We therefore started looking for an alternative in the curriculum: cultural reflection, where the formation of people and society will be explained in more detail.”
A 38 hour week in four days:
The most remarkable idea also comes from the GO! School group: they want to introduce a 38-hour week, not spread over five but four teaching days.
Onderdonk: “Working full-time in four days is an opportunity in Brussels, because many of the teachers live in Flanders and that travel is stressful for them.”
Onderdonk does not want to impose anything on the schools, just to be clear. That is why he is now consulting with the various parties involved, “so that both the teaching team and the parents are fully behind this”.
Structural Solutions
Both the GO! School group such as Sint-Goedele Brussel are satisfied with Weyts’ openness. But De Lille still detects a number of dangers. “It is quite a responsibility that we as a group of schools cannot handle alone,” he says.
And also: “It should not be that the government does nothing anymore: things still have to be done to make the profession attractive, such as the introduction of a Brussels premium”, it sounds.
Onderdonk is also satisfied with the pilot projects, “but it has all dragged on for far too long,” he notes. “When our school group proposed some of the ideas at the time, it sounded: way too far-reaching. But now suddenly it is possible. As a result – unfortunately – a lot of precious time has been lost.”
This article is originally published on bruzz.be
