Union warns measures to tackle teacher shortage not enough

The National Federation of Education (FNE) believes that the new proposal from the Ministry of Education to reduce the number of students who do not attend classes due to a shortage of teachers must be improved, otherwise the problems will persist.

“We are not yet fully satisfied with each of the eight points identified, since these urgent and extraordinary measures must be accompanied by others that make us expect that in four or five years we will not have to resort to other extraordinary measures,” he said. . FNE Secretary General Pedro Barreiros at the end of a meeting with a team led by Education Minister Fernando Alexandre to discuss the “Plan +Aulas + Sucesso”.

The FNE needs measures to make the teaching career more attractive. This criticism was also voiced by the National Federation of Teachers (Fenprof), which once again warned of the need for measures to support housing and travel for those placed in schools far from home.

FNE points to some problems with the government’s plan, such as the possibility of increasing the amount of overtime teachers work from the current five hours a week to ten a week.

“A teacher with a weekly workload of one hour could mean that he will have ten more classes, that is, 250 more students, and this does not make any sense because it is an incomprehensible overload of work,” said Pedro Barreiros, stressing that this is a measure that always depends on the acceptance of teachers.

For the FNE, this proposal can only be accepted if supervision ensures that teachers “will not have more than ten classes”, that is, by adding a new clause defining the maximum number of classes or hours that teachers can take.

“More classes and more students also mean less time for each of them,” warned Pedro Barreiros, arguing that administrative and bureaucratic tasks need to be eliminated so that teachers can dedicate more to students and “less paperwork.”

Another criticism from FNE concerns the possibility that schools are hiring teachers who do not have the knowledge that students need.

Despite the criticism, the FNE says it does not want to request an additional meeting so as not to make it impossible to implement some of the measures that will be applied in the next school year.

Alternatively, FNE will send some suggestions for improvement this week and thus try to “contribute to ensuring that the number of students not attending classes is lower than what has happened so far.”

One of the goals of the ministry’s plan is to reach December with a 90% reduction in the number of students left without classes due to a shortage of teachers, compared with the figures recorded last year.

During the meeting, the unions and the ministry also discussed the “shortcomings and errors” found in the current competition for teachers, with the FNE also criticising the fact that there are teachers who only find out in August which school they will be teaching at.

Pedro Barreiros said the minister had promised to return to work so that the competitions for the employment of teachers could be completed much earlier, so that “at the end of May they would know in which schools they would be able to work.”