MBO teachers think that work pressure is too high

Tekst Karen Hagen - Redactie Onderwijsblad - 4 april 2017 - Minder dan een minuut om te lezen

Almost three quarters of MBO teachers experience a high workload. Lesson-related tasks and educational innovations in particular cause stress for teachers.

This is evident from one research of the expertise center for vocational education (ecbo) for which teachers were interviewed and nearly a thousand teachers completed a questionnaire.

Nearly 80 percent of the respondents indicate that they do not have enough time to properly perform all tasks.

Three quarters of the teachers surveyed believe that they have too little room to accommodate colleagues who drop out temporarily. Slightly less than half think the class sizes are too large.

Lecturers who teach vocational subjects indicate that if there are problems with students, there is little time left to perform their other tasks properly (78,1 percent). Colleagues who teach general subjects, such as Dutch and English, say they spend a lot of time on administrative tasks (87,4 percent).

Professionalization and innovation

Professionalization is lost due to the high workload: 60 percent of the respondents indicate this. About eight in ten teachers say that the workload is at the expense of the attention to students and the time they should spend on innovation.

To reduce the workload, teachers should be given more time to prepare and start up a new course. Scheduling extra time for unforeseen issues is another solution.

The Stichting Onderwijsarbeidsmarktfonds MBO (SOM), where the AOb in fact, wants to use the research to encourage schools to reduce their workload. SOM also refers to the collective labor agreement for mbo. It already contains work-pressure-reducing agreements. For example, it has been recorded how many hours teachers have for lessons and professionalization, for example. Education teams should be given space for educational development more often than is currently the case.