The steady advance of the temporary contract

Tekst arno kersten - redactie onderwijsblad - 13 juni 2019 - 8 Minuten om te lezen

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Schools with more temporary than permanent teachers exist. Take the Vuurvogel public primary school in Tilburg. The teachers with permanent contracts together occupy 5 full-time jobs (FTE) this school year. The temporary appointments add up to 7,4 FTE, or 60 percent. Last school year and the year before, the ratio was exactly the opposite: then three-quarters of the teaching staff were permanently employed.

Yes, those figures are correct, confirms director Brigitte IJpelaar. And there is a story behind it. Last year five permanent teachers left for various reasons. “That departure created a considerable gap. We filled those vacancies with new teachers who initially start with a temporary appointment. ”

De Buitenkans primary school in Heerenveen even has 0 percent permanent appointments. At least, in the personnel figures recently published by the executive organization Duo. Director Theo Rinsma frowns: that image is incorrect. The school started after the summer of 2016 with 64 students: three groups and five part-time teachers. They started with a temporary appointment. Two of them are still employed and have a permanent contract. "That amounts to an added 1,6 FTE as of September 1, 2018. Why that is not reflected in the figures of Duo, I do not know." Of the 6,8 full-time jobs for teachers, 3 FTEs are now temporary, says Rinsma.

Picture: Type tank

Teacher pools

Simply put: temporary is everyone who is employed by the school board, but does not have a permanent contract. A repository of short-term replacement contracts, annual contracts with the prospect of a permanent appointment and LIOs. Who is not covered: employees who are hired through self-employed and temporary employment structures.

The permanent contract is still the norm in primary education. Nine out of ten teachers are permanent employees. In shrinking regions in the north, east and south of the country, these percentages are even higher. Understandable, says Elly van der Beek, personnel advisor at the Primato foundation in Hengelo, also a shrinking area, where 98 percent of teachers have a permanent contract. “You fly in temporarily where you need expansion or in a very specific educational domain for which you cannot find a suitable interpretation within your own file, such as our gifted school."

Particularly in shrinking regions, school boards themselves or together have set up pools of teachers who can be deployed flexibly in schools, but who do have a permanent appointment. The teacher shortage there is also slightly less acute than in Randstad. In the middle and west it is more difficult to find enough teachers or to bind them to the school.

“The teacher shortage is most severe in the Randstad, where you also have more schools in difficult neighborhoods. If the turnover is greater somewhere, you will also see more temporary appointments there, ”he said AObdriver Eugenie Stolk. A positive explanation could be that administrations in the large cities are now increasingly wanting to abandon flex and temporary employment structures. Although externally hired personnel, who are not on the payroll, has also increased in recent years. As the inspectorate notes in the most recent State of Education: "Expansion of the workforce is increasingly done through flex contracts, which are beyond the normal personnel statistics." Converted into FTEs, the size of non-salaried staff in primary education has risen since 2012 from over 2700 to about 4500 in 2017, according to the inspectorate.

New colleagues

Fixed may be the norm, temporary contracts have been steadily advancing in primary education for years. Since 2012, the share of temporary staff has more than doubled. While 2012 percent was temporary in 5,4, this school year is more than 13 percent. Or, to put it in terms of full-time jobs: compared to six years ago, primary education has ten thousand fewer permanent jobs and almost as many temporary jobs more.

Primary education staff in full-time jobs (FTE)

Source: Research Implementation Department

If you look at specific job groups within this, then teachers show the same trend. The number of permanent contracts fell from 91 thousand to just under 83 thousand, temporary appointments grew from less than five to ten thousand. The pension wave undoubtedly plays a role in this: retired teachers with permanent contracts are replaced by new colleagues, who are initially employed temporarily. Within primary education, the share of temporary teachers is highest in (secondary) special education.

The growth of temporary contracts is much stronger in support functions. The workload agreement also has a hand in this. Many schools use the money to attract additional teaching assistants. This school year alone, 2750 full-time jobs for support staff were added, many of which are starting temporarily.

Personnel in full-time jobs (FTE) per sector

Source: Research Implementation Department

Phone calls

Duo published the latest personnel figures at the end of March and the beginning of April. It shows how many teachers, support staff and directors each school board and each individual school employed on October 1, 2018, temporarily and permanently. Initially, this article started as a survey of educational institutions with very few permanent staff. Phone calls to school leaders and P&O departments also unexpectedly revealed something else: imperfections in personnel administration and schools that were not recognized in the figures.

For example, there was a small primary school in Limburg where the team suddenly quadrupled a few years ago. This has resulted in a strong growth in the number of temporary appointments. They knew nothing about the school itself: the same people were still walking around there. Upon inquiry, it turned out that the overarching board had set up a teacher pool and that the FTEs were administratively placed under that one school, "because they have to be registered at one of the schools."

At the Friese Poort MBO school, 54 percent of the teachers are said to be in temporary employment. They were quite surprised about that in Leeuwarden. After rapid internal research, the institution reached into its own bosom: in the administration system, a field with the employment relationship was not updated for some of the staff, so that more temporary appointments were sent to Duo than there actually are.

They fell from their seats at the Vrijzinnig-Christelijk Lyceum in The Hague. There, almost 53 percent of the teachers would be on temporary employment. After careful consultation with the administrative office, the head of the organization & management department identified the leak. In the personnel administration, 22 employees with an appointment for an indefinite period were still on 'determined'. The South Holland Develstein College, which is located at the same administration office, did not recognize itself in the figures. Half of the staff have a temporary appointment, that is not possible at all, according to rector Matthijs den Haan. "No dude, then people say: Check it out and they go to another school."

And then there was still a lot of hassle around the delivery of personnel data from the Raet administration system to Duo. The quarterly data transfer failed at first, which was later restored. According to Duo, this had no influence on the reliability of the personnel figures published by the implementing organization. “The data supplied has been taken over by us. But if the records of the school board or the administrative office contain outdated or incorrect information, then of course we cannot do anything about it, ”said a Duo spokesperson.

Picture: Type tank

Risk avoiding

During the tour, another phenomenon emerged: teachers who are kept on a temporary contract for not one, but two years for a regular vacancy. “Our policy is that we do not immediately put new people on a permanent contract, but look at their performance for two years. We need that time to go through the full interview cycle and to be able to properly assess whether they fit the school and the team, ”says director IJpelaar of the Vuurvogel.

Same with the Buitenkans. “We have a different educational concept. We do not work with a guiding method, but we make an inventory of the learning objectives that have been achieved every ten weeks. We take two years to guide people, one year is too short for that ”, says director Rinsma. Teachers who receive a two-year contract will continue to be paid during the summer holidays, both directors say. So they are not in the WW summer peak.

It had to add that you would have to go to the UWV in the summer, responds AObdriver Eugenie Stolk. She believes that teachers should be eligible for a permanent contract after one year. “That has always been the starting point and it still should be. One year is usually enough to assess whether people are suitable. That is, if you have the assessment cycle in order. I do not think that maintaining two years of temporary contracts is a good employer. That is unnecessary risk-averse behavior. You also have the chance that younger people look further or give up. These times require a different attitude, a different personnel policy. ”

It goes without saying that a permanent contract is and should remain the norm, according to Stolk. “If you want to combat the teacher shortage, you have to ensure that education is an attractive sector. And that means that in addition to a decent salary, you also offer security. So no temporary employment contracts and a minimum of temporary contracts. It is also very important for the mutual relationships in the team that you dare to bind people to you. ”

This article is from the June issue of the Education Magazine