It’s the first weekend of the new school year and the start of the school year in particular. The students experienced their first two days of class on Thursday and Friday. The government ensures that this start of the school year is going well, even if there are still a lot of teachers missing since there are more than 4,000 unfilled positions for this start of the school year. But there is the use of contract workers, 3,000 people hired by the State for this start of the school year, they were trained in a few days before being put in front of the students.
franceinfo: Jean Viard, how do you explain this lack of love for this profession today?
John Viard: I believe there are several causes. Of course, there is the issue of salary. But when you look at an article in the daily The World en Germany, wages are double. They lack so many teachers, so money matters, but it’s not the only criterion. We are in a society of discontinuity, that is to say that, on the whole, life has lengthened. We change our romantic partner, job, house, political beliefs, etc. more often.
However, teaching is a profession. Indeed, you will take it for 40 years, without much chance of promotion. If you have your Geo History Capes, (certificate of aptitude for teaching secondary education) 40 years later, you will still be a geo-history teacher with a salary of Capes.
Basically, there is no promotion, there is no discontinuity in the adventure. And it seems to me that we are in a time when our lives, we want it to be adventures, because it is not only education, the public service is struggling to find staff. So professions where there is no possible professional adventure, they have to be transformed, because basically, it destroys the desire to go there.
How is the profile of recently hired contract teachers different from that of teachers who take the competitive exams?
They have often had responsibilities in companies, in the economic fabric, and they are used to hosting meetings. The bottom of my thought is that it’s a very nice job to do at 40, teacher, as the second part of life. When you have things to give to children, and not just what you learned at school, business experiences, artistic experiences, travel experiences, etc., there is a whole lot of thinking to be done on these jobs.
So I would insist on the enrichment that this brings, even if in some cases, there must also be unsuitable people in front of the classes. It is not only the diploma that allows access to these professions. Let’s try to see that also as an enrichment. In France, it is also often difficult to create all the small jobs around these teachers, precisely so that they are concentrated on teaching, on the relationship with the pupils, when they have a multitude of administrative tasks which actually take up part of their schedule.
The Minister of Education, Papa Ndiaye, promised that no teacher would start their career on less than 2,000 euros net per month from the start of the 2023 school year. You also underline the importance of correct remuneration for the purposes careers ?
Teachers have gone down dramatically in salary over the past 30 years. But if we take the ratio to the SMIG, they have not halved but almost, there is a devaluation of the salary which also leads to a devaluation of social recognition, including vis-à-vis the parents of the pupils. The teacher sometimes earns half or a third of the student’s parent.
The salary is also a symbolic recognition and it is a question of social position. So upgrading is not just a question of income, it is also putting teachers back in the hierarchy of society. They are executives to whom we entrust our children, and it is not a daycare service. At a certain point, we confused education and daycare a bit, and that’s a big mistake.