Thousands of teachers not legally qualified in Quebec

(Montreal) Faced with a shortage of manpower, Quebec is relying more and more on non-legally qualified teachers in the education network.

An unqualified teacher may have a university degree in a discipline other than teaching or even not have one.

They come from a wide variety of fields, but they all have one thing in common: none of them have a teaching certificate.

As of December, the Ministry of Education counted 9,184 non-legally qualified teachers in the province’s public schools, an increase of 3.5% from May 2024 and 38% from May 2023. This number does not include not the thousands of substitute teachers who do not have a teaching certificate either.

In 2023, the Auditor General of Quebec indicated that during the 2020-2021 school year, the number of non-legally qualified teachers amounted to more than 30,000, mainly substitutes, or more than a quarter of teachers .

Nicolas Prévost, the president of the Fédération québécoise des establishments d’enseignement, expects that the number of non-legally qualified teachers will continue to increase over the coming years because recruitment into teaching programs is in progress. decline and many teachers will retire.

Geneviève Sirois, academic training teacher at TÉLUQ, shares this opinion. “We are now very dependent on unqualified teachers,” she says. In 2015, there were around 15,000 non-legally qualified teachers, a figure that has doubled in less than a decade.

Taking care not to place all non-legally qualified teachers in the same boat, M^me Sirois emphasizes that a teacher who has not received training can influence student learning.

Matthieu Théorêt is a 47-year-old non-legally qualified teacher. He has already signed two long-term contracts, but he prefers to be a substitute. Unqualified teachers are often assigned after the start of the school year without having time to prepare, he laments. This means that many of them depend on the information they get from their colleagues.

Mr. Théorêt says that some teachers at the high school where he works helped him last year, but they were too busy or tired to do it this year. He doesn’t blame them. “They took a lot of their time to help me and the other teachers before me and they are tired,” he said, admitting to sometimes feeling like a burden on their shoulders.

This fatigue is not just limited to teachers, but also to secretaries and other support staff. “Everyone must do their part,” he believes.

At P^re Sirois mentions that new university programs were founded at the request of Quebec to quickly grant a certificate to teachers. She adds that the government grants temporary authorizations to students who enroll in training programs.

Valérie Harmois, a doctoral candidate at Laval University who studies the Ministry of Education’s response to staff shortages, laments that there are few incentives to convince unqualified teachers to obtain a certificate.

The demand is so great, she explains, that non-legally qualified teachers get a regular position and a salary almost identical to that of qualified teachers.

“There are few financial benefits to getting a teaching certificate,” she says.

In a written statement, the Department of Education says the government spends millions of dollars recruiting and retaining employees. Thus, 39.6 million were spent to make part-time positions more attractive, 37 million to convince teachers not to retire and 37 million to support teaching staff.