The Auditor General (AG) of Quebec has just tabled a devastating report on the shortage of elementary and secondary teaching staff. Guylaine Leclerc’s audit insists on the fact that, in the frantic race led by Quebec against the lack of teachers in the classrooms, the desperate retreat towards less and less qualified personnel directly affects the quality of education and, by extension, student success. As for measuring the extent of the phenomenon, it is impossible to know, because one of the most distressing findings of its analysis reveals that the Ministry of Education is progressing in ignorance of several essential data.
Devastating. There is no other word to describe the content of this audit carried out in four school service centers (CSS) and at the Ministry of Education on one of the most hotly debated phenomena in education at the moment, or the glaring lack of teachers to occupy all the classes on the territory. It’s not a figure of speech: every year, at the start of the school year, parents and children walk towards school with fear in their stomachs, dreading running into the wall of the empty classroom. The VG report confirms that in 2020-2021, more than a quarter of the teachers who worked were not legally qualified. Of these 30,521 people, there are 26,743 for whom Quebec has no information concerning their profile. None.
It is the politics of desperation, nothing more and nothing less. To avoid empty classrooms and interruption of service, school service centers are reduced to hiring anyone, without contempt for the voluntary work of these teachers for a day, a week, a months, a year… As long as the phenomenon remained peripheral and circumscribed, no one cried foul. But with more than 25% of “teachers” meeting this profile, we can now sound the alarm. The quality of teaching is not a frivolity; it is the main success factor for a student and a screen for dropping out of school.
If only we could use the pretext of the unforeseen nature of this bloodletting to explain our collective disappointment in the face of the phenomenon! Unfortunately, from the beginning of the 2000s, indicators pointed to the shortage that is currently hitting in such a way that it threatens the balance of the school network and weakens its primary mission. A rising number of students, retirements, a high rate of absenteeism during the school year — 2.1 million days of absence in 2020-2021, or the equivalent of 10,500 full-time teachers —, an insufficient rate of persistence in teacher training programs and the desertion of the profession very early in the career of new teachers: all these factors together shape the shortage we are facing.
The temptation to cut corners on hiring requirements is not new either. As early as 2004, the Higher Council for Education expressed concern in its opinion A breath of fresh air for the teaching profession by the possible effect of a shortage on the quality of education. In 2021, while the Minister of Education Jean-François Roberge had to turn to provisional authorizations to teach to stem the shortage, the same Superior Council of Education considered that these concessions on the quality of education were too important. He even dared to make a meaningful hypothesis: in a context of valorization of the teaching profession, he concluded, “accommodations of this nature and of such magnitude would be rejected from the outset for other professions on the basis of arguments relating to the protection of the public”.
School principals interviewed as part of the audit confide that they are forced to keep teachers whose skills they deem insufficient. These same school principals concede that, for lack of time, they do not evaluate the work of current teachers. In this unspeakable fog, neither the school principals, nor the CSS, nor either the Ministry of Education are equipped to paint a clear picture of the situation. This totally contravenes the spirit and the letter of the Education Act.
The AG also deplores the absence of a global action plan rallying all the actors concerned, regardless of their dissent, around the urgency of the situation. The Ministry of Education claims to have created in October 2022 a Directorate of Workforce Planning and Quantitative Assessments which has since designed a “workforce needs forecasting tool”. It was time ! The vicious circle in which the problem of scarcity revolves will be difficult to stop. The attractiveness of the profession, hit hard by the lack of teachers, is in free fall, and the contemporary issues related to school are hindering the entry of new players while pushing the actors in place towards the exit. earlier than expected. There is danger in delay.