If it is up to the administrators in the capital, teachers in primary education in Amsterdam are given a questionable role, while ‘artists, accountants and musicians’ are increasingly joining forces with the pupils. It’s on the front page today The parole.

“With this foolish plan you chase the last official teachers from the schools”

Thijs Roovers, daily director of the AOb: “I shouted out loud: ‘Have you been ripped off’ when I read the article. The sentence ‘the classic educational image in which we put a teacher in front of a class is going to disappear’ made me shudder. And when it was later explained that teachers were given a ‘coordinating role’, I was sure: with this foolish plan you are chasing the last official teachers from the schools.”

The Amsterdam alderman for education Marjolein Moorman is also not amused. She says on Twitter: ‘A shortage of teachers is a bigger one, a slope, that we can never accept as the new normal. ‘

Ambitions

In Het Parool, Harry Dobbelaar (Zonova), Marton de Pinth (Innoord) and Theo Hooghiemstra (AWBR) indicate on behalf of the forty Amsterdam school boards that the ambitions to reduce the teacher shortage to less than 5 percent have not been achieved. They believe that education ‘must move along with social and urban developments’. That is why interventions from what was originally an official emergency plan were now extended to ‘at least the initial five to ten years’.

‘Education is a profession for which you need a completed HBO education’

Roofs of the AOb suspect that these administrators often see a classroom from the inside. “I don’t understand how people dare to put this. If we have a shortage of surgeons, pilots or dentists, aren’t we going to make up for that with people from the arts and the financial world? Education is a profession – the most beautiful profession in the world – but it is a profession for which you need a completed higher vocational education.”

Together with Parents & Education and Defense for Children, the AOb drew up a manifesto in December 2022: ‘Every child a qualified teacher in 2030.’ Roofers: “We want the cabinet all together Please note that they must ensure that in 2030 aboutalready certified teachers in the classroom. Education is an enshrined right in a vNchildren’s rights treaty. Of course we also understand that solutions must be found until then, but putting an accountant in front of a class of children is not education. That is reception.”

Sign the manifesto!

According to Roovers, the Amsterdam plans show that school boards have too much power. “These are consequences with far-reaching consequences. Education is a public matter that concerns us all. Decisions about education should be made by a democratically elected body, by the people who provide education every day. And thereby knowing the implications of errors. But in any case not by administrators who are clearly far from practice.”

The AOb notes that employers can do much more to retain people for education. Roovers: “Offer permanent contracts and good supervision, so that we retain people instead of chasing them away. That is possible, we believe in it, now for the directors.”

No style

Solving the teacher shortage by declaring that the teacher shortage cannot be solved is “a powerful example of rethinking,” according to author Ronaldo on No style: ‘This is how the water companies are working the new shower where there is no longer constant water coming out of the tap and the shower head takes on a more different role. Also solved!’

Read more: Every kind a qualified teacher in 2030