BC produces thousands of teachers yearly, many can’t find work
Posted April 28, 2016 8:51 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – There’s a teacher imbalance in BC and it includes both an overabundance and shortage. Glyn Lewis with Canadian Parents for French BC & Yukon says it all depends on the discipline says
“About one-third of those 2,700 teachers are able to find work which means there’s a whole host of teachers who get certified and come out of these post-secondary programs and who are unable to find work or are under-employed and wind up on teacher on-call lists,” says Lewis. “And they can sit on these teacher on-call lists for many years.”
But there is another side to the issue.
“There are some teachers who graduate from teacher education programs who are lucky enough to have a teachable discipline that is in demand, so something like French, the sciences, math, the trades, stuff like that. These teachers are actually head-hunted and recruited while they’re still doing their teacher practicum. What we’ve seen is there’s a complete imbalance between the demand and the supply of teachers by teachable discipline.”
The group has written an open letter to the province’s education minister urging BC to take a closer look at how it certifies teachers for certain subjects.
“Namely, too many teachers are being certified with certain teachable disciplines, and too few are being certified in others,” says Lewis, in an open letter to education minister Mike Bernier, advanced education minister Andrew Wilkinson and jobs minister Shirley Bond.
British Columbia only produces around 20 per cent of the required number of French immersion teachers each year. He says the province and post-secondary teaching programs need to do a better job of educating their students about what disciplines are in demand.
