AOb calls for substantial investments to give the labor market a boost
Billions will be needed in the coming years to make the education labor market healthy. That states the AOb today in a manifesto about work pressure. "We can really bring our industry back to health. If we reduce class size, reduce the number of classes per teacher, arrange support closer to classes and reduce the number of flex workers by creating more real jobs," said AObchairman Liesbeth Verheggen.
Inadequate funding has led to a major problem in Dutch education: there is structural overtime and so many people in no other professional group run into burnout. Representative research of AOb shows that a teaching week for a primary school teacher averages almost 47 hours. In secondary education this amounts to more than 45 hours.
Simultaneously, the AOb also the results of a collective labor agreement survey showing that one in eight people working in education is considering leaving the sector: the salary is too low, the workload is too high.
Less teaching hours, smaller classes
Following these investigations, the AOb a list on with proposals that can curb the workload. For example, the union wants the group size in primary and secondary education to be tackled. The number of teaching hours must also be reduced in these sectors and in secondary vocational education. Verheggen: "We are not demanding anything radical: it is a summary of logical suggestions. A motion has already been adopted by D66 and PvdA for lesson reduction in secondary education, and there is also broad support for the plea to work with smaller groups."
Need a lot more money
The costs of the operation are considerable.
We have made a careful calculation and arrive at 2,3 billion euros for work pressure reduction alone, and that is still without quantifying what reduction of lessons in MBO will cost.
“We are still working on that. If you add the necessary salary repair of several billions of euros to that, then you end up with a very substantial amount structurally. More than twice as high as our provisional claim of one and a half billion euros at the end of November, which turned out to be far too cautious."
De AOb understands that politicians will swallow when reading that amount. "Parts of this operation will have to be done in phases: lesson reduction cannot be done in a hurry. You need sufficient staff for that," says AObchairman Verheggen. "But the reality is that we have been warning the government for years that the Netherlands wants to be in the first rank when it comes to education. That worked for a long time because the fanaticism of education staff was abused. But it did lead to allowed teacher training to lose popularity at a time when the retirement wave was getting underway. As a result, we have a thousand unfilled teacher vacancies in secondary education and another thousand in primary education. If nothing happens, we will be at the even with four thousand unfilled vacancies in primary education at the end of the coming cabinet period. So I fear that the ladies and gentlemen politicians will have to deal with it."
