Teacher shortage | Immigration not to blame, experts say

The school year began on a familiar note for Quebec: thousands of teaching positions went unfilled and the provincial government had to defend its inability to solve the problem.

While politicians continue to point the finger at immigration as the primary cause, a common justification for the province’s problems, education experts say newcomers are not the underlying cause of the widespread teacher shortage.

Quebec Premier François Legault told reporters last week that the number of children needing teachers is increasing due to the rise in immigrants. He also cited working conditions and salaries as other factors influencing the shortage of staff in the education system.

In mid-August, Education Minister Bernard Drainville said there were 20,000 more students enrolled than last year, about 80 per cent of whom are newcomers to the province. With about 5,700 teaching positions unfilled, he called for the federal government to “regain control of the immigration process to reduce temporary immigration to Quebec, particularly asylum seekers.” Statistics from last week showed that 1,957 teaching positions were still unfilled in the education system.

Mr. Drainville’s calculations, however, do not hold water, believes Diane Querrien, professor in the French studies department at Concordia University.

“Even if we start from the worst-case scenario, that is, the 20,000 additional students are all immigrants, it doesn’t make sense,” said Mr.^me Querrien explains that dividing this figure by the approximately 5,700 unfilled positions would be equivalent to hiring a teacher for groups of only three to four students.

The Canadian Press asked the Education Ministry for details, but it did not respond.

Immigration, added Mr.^me Querrien does not explain why some peripheral regions, which welcome fewer immigrants than the big cities, also lack teachers, and have done so for years.

Mélanie Hubert, president of the Fédération autonome de l’enseignement, said it’s true that an increase in the number of immigrant children requires more staff in French-language schools. However, Quebec has not done much to replace the generation of teachers who are retiring, she lamented.

“As long as we have a lot of people retiring and fewer people coming out of college, we’re bound to have a teacher shortage. That’s something we could have anticipated,” she said.

“Maybe we wouldn’t be in the current situation and we would be able to absorb the number of students who are coming from immigrant families.”

A widespread problem

The teacher shortage is also being felt in the province’s English-language schools, although French-language laws require the vast majority of immigrants to enroll their children in the French-language system.

Steven Le Sueur, president of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers, said the increase in immigrant students has had minimal impact on Quebec’s English schools, which are still looking for qualified teachers. As of Friday, Le Sueur said there were 200 vacancies.

Poor working conditions and low wages over the past two decades have meant fewer people are enrolling in teaching programs and many educators are quitting soon after entering the system. “We lose 25 per cent of our new teachers in the first five years, and that needs to be addressed,” Le Sueur said.

University of Sherbrooke professor Philippa Parks, who studies why teachers leave the profession, thinks Le Sueur’s 25 per cent estimate is fairly conservative; she said statistics vary, but the figure could be as high as 50 per cent.

Immigration is “a drop in the ocean,” Mr.^me Parks: “I think it’s a bit of under-talk and dishonesty, because it’s just one of many factors.”

The main reason, she said, is that teachers do not receive the necessary support and training in the classroom, especially after reforms that brought students with learning and physical disabilities, who were previously educated separately, into the same classes as other children.

The other problem, according to Mr.^me Parks says teaching is no longer the middle-class profession with the status it once was. “I started teaching in 1998 and was able to buy a house. I was even able to put a down payment on my teaching salary and now things have changed dramatically.”

Despite recent pay increases – 17.4 per cent over five years – that came after thousands of teachers went on strike in the province last year, Mr. Le Sueur and Mr.^me Parks says it will take time to attract more teachers to the profession and that more needs to be done to make educators’ daily lives easier.

According to François Rocher, professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa and researcher on immigration and Quebec nationalism, the current teacher shortage is “just another example of how the CAQ has approached the issue of immigration.”

“Immigration has been named as the cause of many other ‘problems’ that we have seen in Quebec,” he noted, adding that the CAQ has also blamed immigrants for the housing crisis, the decline in the use of French in Quebec and the increase in demand for health services.