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The French government plans a salary increase of about 10% for teachers in view of the fact that about 4,000 positions have not been filled in schools ahead of the start of the school season, after the summer holidays. The Ministry of Education relaxed its state hiring requirements and began an express plan to recruit professionals.
A shortage of teachers in France just days before going back to school. Emmanuel Macron’s government has promised salary increases for teachers as it seeks to fill 4,000 vacancies in the education sector.
According to Macron, “no teacher will start his career with less than 2,000 euros net per month”, which would mean a rise of about 10% compared to the current one. The announcement comes as an incentive for teachers while French officials debate how to do more attractive educational sector for current and future professionals in the country.
The Ministry of Education initiated an express plan organized by the Paris Academy in which it seeks to train and formalize almost 200 contract teachers, while French schools make rapid hiring plans by relaxing the previous requirements in which an aspiring teacher was required have a master’s degree in education and pass a difficult certification exam.
A school district in Versailles, southwest of Paris, organized 30-minute interviews with 2,000 candidates from outside the profession in June. With the massive call they hope to find people suitable for the job and then train them in record time.
Isabelle Dosso-Greggia is one of those 200 contractors who see these trainings as one more opportunity to return to teaching: “This training already gives us many elements, it gives us clues, tools, resources. And then we will go to the field to practice, of course because it is a field job. Perhaps we have forgotten but a long time ago you could be a teacher just by having a high school diploma in your pocket and you learned the teaching profession as you went along, I mean in primary school, but that scenario changed later”.
Although Macron has been implementing an increase in teachers’ salaries since 2020, the head of the education portfolio, Pap Ndiaye, acknowledged with the growing teacher crisis that in July teachers’ salaries “were not objectively at the level that would be expected.”
With the new measure, the French government now intends that, apart from the general increase, teachers can also receive additional increases in their salary based on extra tasks or responsibilities that professionals want to assume in the face of staff shortages.
“It is a way to enter the profession with a different status, but also a different path. Today, there are all these entries that are possible and we are working to train each of these teachers as well as possible,” Sébastien Pierrisnard, adviser to the Paris contractors, told the AFP news agency.
Salaries for teachers in France are below the average for their peers in other rich countries and about half the level of their German equivalents. Teachers with 15 years of experience earn around $40,000 a year before taxes in France, according to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
with AFP
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