For several months this year, Katherine Korakakis’ kids had substitute instructors that were “not qualified to teach the subject,” said the Montreal parent, whose province started this school year thousands of teachers short.
“It wasn’t a math teacher who was teaching math. It wasn’t a French teacher who was teaching French.”
She was already worried about learning loss after the pandemic, and scrambled to get her teens extra tutoring, a luxury she knows not everyone can afford.
“Having a child score in the high 90s … one year in math and then having a non-qualified teacher coming in the second year and the child scoring a 50 — there’s something wrong here,” she said.
Teacher shortages have become an issue in nearly every province and territory. Kids facing one substitute teacher after another. French taught by a non-speaker. Relying on uncertified adults to supervise classrooms.
While some governments suggest an aging workforce and growing populations are behind the shortages, teachers themselves point to working conditions. So what’s being done to improve the situation for next year?
‘Just getting through the day’
In Surrey, B.C., Anne Whitmore noted that in her children’ 17-class elementary school, four teachers were on leave as the school year concluded. Whenever a classroom teacher was away, her kids said, they sometimes got a substitute for part of the day, but also likely saw another class’s teacher, the librarian, the music instructor and the principal fill in.
“How do you learn in an environment where you have no continuity?” Whitmore asked. “They’re trying to scramble and have some kind of educational content, but really they’re just getting through the day.”
Constantly backfilling others leaves fellow teachers, support staffers, guidance counsellors and administrators delaying their own responsibilities to students, “who now don’t have access to those adults when they need them,” said Brampton, Ont., high school science teacher Jason Bradshaw.
Alison Osborne, who served as president of the Ontario Principals’ Council this year, describes the situation as the worst she’s seen in her 17 years as a principal, with administrators “constantly monitoring our phones just to see what the situation we’re going to be walking into the next day,” she said.
What’s influencing shortages?
The overall number of educators in K-12 public schools rose slightly — around three per cent — from 401,286 in 2018-2019 to 413,667 in 2022-2023, according to Statistics Canada, but depending on the region, the figures have wavered during that period.
CBC News asked each provincial and territorial ministry of education about teacher shortages, with B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and New Brunswick responding. Some cited retirement of an aging workforce and rapid population growth as key factors influencing current shortages.
Brock University’s David Hutchison, a professor of educational studies, outlines the main factors behind teacher shortages in nearly every province and territory.
Limited housing and a higher cost of living have perennially kept more teachers from certain regions, including remote and rural areas, said Clint Johnston, president designate of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation (CTF), the national group representing the unions of more than 365,000 K-12 teachers and education workers.
Yet Johnston says today’s working conditions are what’s behind current shortages, as teachers bail on the traditional 30-to-35-year teaching careers.
“There’s a lot of certified individuals in most of our provinces and territories, but … they’re not sticking with it,” Johnston said from Vancouver. “There’s not enough support workers. There’s not enough teachers … everyone’s workload has gone up and become untenable.”
An online CTF survey last fall drew nearly 5,000 responses from Canadian teachers, education workers and principals. While not statistically representative of the 365,000 educators represented by its members unions, those who chose to respond paint a difficult picture.
Nearly 80 per cent of respondents reported struggling to cope, 55 per cent had experienced violence or aggression over the year prior and 77 per cent called students’ needs “significantly more complex” than five years earlier.
The constant pivoting educators were forced into during COVID-19 also took a toll, says science teacher Bradshaw. Given that a key pandemic lesson was to take better care of ourselves, “that can mean stepping away from stressful work … where you feel you’re being overextended.”
Job ‘isn’t worth the conditions that we’re facing’
Some areas are struggling to attract young people to the field, with even brand new teachers experiencing burnout.
Having found engineering work isolating after obtaining a bachelor’s in biology, Jadine Kirst chose to become a teacher instead since she loved working with kids, felt inspired by lifelong educators she knew and saw the need for more teachers. Her enthusiasm quickly evaporated, however, after just one year teaching Grade 8 in a francophone school in New Brunswick.
“We had students figuring out loopholes so that they could look at pornography on their in-class iPads. We had a few students who threatened my life — one of [whom] needed to have their locker searched for weapons,” she said.
Once, asking a student to stop talking mid-lesson sparked a barrage of insults and profanity, with Krist feeling “futile” as she tried to calm his screaming. “I couldn’t call the principal; the principal was probably too busy dealing with other students,” she said, recalling feeling alone, without any recourse and worn down. She still works in education, but no longer in the classroom.
“People who aren’t aware of the reality today still look at teaching as an excellent job with two months off and a great pension, but it isn’t worth the conditions that we’re facing.”
Clint Johnston, incoming president of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, shares a personal story about the challenge of supporting a wide spectrum of students from his time as a B.C. classroom teacher.
What’s being done about shortages
Several ministries of education that responded to CBC News’ queries noted ongoing efforts to address the problem, including:
Ontario and New Brunswick are allowing teachers’ colleges to accept more students, while several regions have also floated the idea of accelerating or condensing teacher training, including in Ontario (which had initially doubled the length of study a decade ago to stem a vast supply of new teachers outstripping jobs available for them).
Streamlining educator training is of course possible, says Brock University professor David Hutchison, yet he thinks it would likely cut into the invaluable time aspiring teachers spend inside real schools.
He also predicts a negative impact to the parts of teacher training that were added more recently, for instance about student mental health, use of technology and artificial intelligence, or teaching students whose first language isn’t English or French.
“These are the new realities of being a student in Ontario and other provinces as well and we have an obligation to prepare [new teachers],” he said.
While Ontario principal Osborne welcomes any effort to entice people to education, she worries whether they’d stick around without real change to classroom conditions.
“When we talk about recruiting new teachers, new education workers, I’m not sure it’s always an appealing environment to work in,” she said.
Science teacher Bradshaw wants to see deeper, ongoing investment versus short-term fixes.
“If [governments] want to show teachers that they are valued and respected and give people a reason to come into … and stay in this profession, we have to know that they’re going to invest in us long term,” he said, including pay that keeps up with inflation (versus sign-on bonuses) and increased mobility, since where a teacher starts may not be where they want to stay.
What do aspiring teachers think?
“Knowing that teachers are needed everywhere is awesome,” said teacher-candidate Serzna Issadien, who’s nearing the end of a Brock University program mixing an undergraduate degree with a bachelor’s of education.
Still, she’s uneasy about initiatives that may “just flood the market with more teachers” without adequate training, given the chaotic reality she’s already seen, having filled in as an emergency substitute in the St. Catharines, Ont., region.
Bridgette Walpole, another teacher-candidate close to completing her Brock training, is eager to dive into her dream profession despite a belief that most don’t really understand the job nor the mix of classroom challenges today.
“From a student’s perspective, you see [teachers] handing out assessments. You see them standing at the front of the class delivering content,” she said.
“You don’t see them creating the actual materials for each and every student that learns in a bunch of different ways. You don’t understand the many different hats that they wear…. You’re really everyone all at once.”
