Temporary employment agencies disrupt primary education labor market
The teacher shortage leads to Wild West scenes in the Randstad. The explosively growing demand for primary school substitutes is attracting commercial employment agencies who drive up prices. Amsterdam school boards are looking for measures.
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Employment agencies offer beginning teachers the salary of a teacher with 800 years of experience. Lateral entrants can obtain a PABO diploma in one year at the expense of secondment agencies. They gain work experience during their studies and receive a monthly allowance of 1300 to XNUMX euros. And teaching assistants 'who dare to run groups independently' can, after three days of training, start working as a substitute at a primary school.
Wild growth
“We are dealing with a proliferation of desks,” says Joke Middelbeek, director of the Western Garden Cities Foundation, which runs sixteen public primary schools in Amsterdam Nieuw-West. “Those agencies compete with each other on terms of employment and thus drive up prices. Amsterdam primary schools are offered annual contracts in which 100 euros is requested for a teacher, while a full-timer in permanent employment costs 60 euros. Where does this end? ”
School boards will discuss how they can separate the wheat from the chaff
At the beginning of January, the Amsterdam school boards, united in the Broad Administrative Consultation (BBO), invited the temporary employment agencies active in primary education to a discussion about the disruption of the labor market. “There were parties I had never heard of,” says Middelbeek, who is also chairman of the BBO. "Newcomers who want to make a quick buck from the teacher shortage that also affects established agencies." Because young teachers also often go for the quick money, the substitute pools that school boards have set up themselves have to sell no daily. Schools are then dependent on the employment agencies that charge top rates.
Save salad
The Amsterdam school boards will consult with each other on how they can “separate the wheat from the chaff”. That is not easy, because there is no quality mark with which bona fide entrepreneurs distinguish themselves from the fast guys who are making a profit from the teacher shortage. Middelbeek cannot yet say whether the BBO will draw up a list itself. "We have 43 school boards in Amsterdam and it takes a while to get them aligned."
Read the story from the Education Magazine of February 2018: 'The hunt for the invader'.
