Sylvie Plante was enjoying ice cream on the outskirts of Toronto in August 2016 when she was recruited for a teaching position in a French-language school in Ontario. ” You speak French well ? Are you looking for a job ? “, then asked a school director. A few weeks later, even though she was not a member of the Ontario College of Teachers, the Lévis native was teaching nearly 150 students at a public school in the greater Toronto area.
During the 2016-2017 school year, Sylvie Plante was thus one of the 231 people responsible for a Franco-Ontarian class without being part of the professional order of teachers. Since then, their number has increased by 175%: there were 637 in this situation in 2020-2021.
It is the Ministry of Education that allows these so-called “unqualified” teachers to work, temporarily or in the long term, thanks to a letter of permission. Some are relatives; others have experience in one subject or another but have not been accepted into an educational program. They teach at primary and secondary level.
These people are helping to alleviate the teacher shortage in Ontario, a phenomenon that is not about to end and which could lead more and more school boards to turn to them. In a report published in 2021, experts predicted that the number of unqualified teachers in Franco-Ontarian schools could reach 3,000 by the 2025-2026 school year if no action is taken.
The use of these people is of concern to stakeholders in the education sector who, in some cases, challenge the province. “It worries me, because it means that a large number of students are entrusted to people who do not have adequate training,” notes the director of the teacher training program at the University of ‘Ottawa, Mirela Moldoveanu. “Is having unqualified teachers a good thing? Not necessarily,” notes Yves Lévesque, director general of the Franco-Ontarian Association of Catholic School Boards (AFOCSC).
A demanding job
Sylvie Plante had never taught in an Ontario primary or secondary school before setting foot in her class in October 2016.
The Quebecer was paid about $47,000 a year and says she could work 100 hours a week as the ballots approached. “It was amazing [comme charge de travail]I came close to making a second burnout “, she says.
The Viamonde school board in southern Ontario currently pays 53 unqualified teachers $237 a day, on average.
The native Lévisienne returned to teaching in October 2019 before throwing in the towel for good in 2020. Her experience is not unique: 600 Franco-Ontarian teachers leave the profession each year. The dropout rate for teachers in French school boards is almost twice that of English boards. According to Valérie Morand, Executive Director of the National Federation of Francophone School Boards (FNCSF), new teachers sometimes feel ill-equipped to transmit the Franco-Ontarian language and culture to their students. This dropout rate is also one of the reasons for the increasing use of unqualified teachers by schools.
According to Yves Lévesque, an insufficient number of teachers are trained in the two French-language education programs in Ontario, at the University of Ottawa and at Laurentian University.
Between 2010 and 2015, between 800 and 1,000 teachers graduated there each year; that number fell by half starting in 2015, after the province extended the curriculum by one year and halved the number of seats it funded in colleges of education. Before 2015, when the teacher education program was still only one year long, the University of Ottawa could graduate just over 600 students per year in the field. Between 2015 and 2019, the establishment had only 390 places per year; it has grown to 420 recently, but the university is struggling to fill them.
By email, Mirela Moldoveanu says she cannot comment on the causes and circumstances that led to the reduction in the number of places at the University of Ottawa.
A stagnant number of students
In 2020-21, the number of students in French-language schools in the province did not increase for the first time in eight years. They were 421 less than in 2019-2020. “We should have had 400 more, so it’s 800 less in the background,” said Yves Lévesque.
The latter believes that the pandemic has had a direct effect on the number of enrollments in schools. The decrease, he thinks, is partly attributable to parents’ decision not to send their child to preschool in French. The pandemic and the shortage are “gigantic” challenges to overcome, he says.
Sylvie Plante, for her part, will soon return to Quebec after spending almost 15 years in Ontario. The experience of teaching in pandemic times influenced her decision, but also the future of her children. “Why am I moving to Quebec? Because the level of French was not good enough for my children to be able to go to CEGEP and university in French,” she confides, well aware that this comment risks attracting criticism. “I didn’t trust that they could pass the uniform French test,” she says.
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.