The COVID pandemic has exacerbated the existing cracks in Quebec’s public school system. A low rate of student achievement in French language skills, overburdened teachers, and a persistent lack of student motivation and confidence are indeed all telltale signs. Furthermore, Minister of Education Bernard Drainville has recently announced that his government will not be able to fulfill its promise of creating 5000 kindergarten classes for 4-year-olds by 2023-2024 (it currently stands at 1600), instead aiming to achieve half of that by 2025-2026. All of these setbacks are in part the result of a much greater issue, which is the fact that Quebec’s education system is currently experiencing a severe shortage of teachers. 

This begs the obvious question: how many teachers are missing? Awkwardly enough, no one really knows. Serious gaps in the Ministry of Education’s capacity to gather data across its school service centers – and perhaps also a lack of transparency – prevents the government from releasing an official figure. While the Ministry announced at the beginning of this school year that 700 teaching positions had to be filled urgently, some advocacy groups working in the field claim that this number could be twice as high as the Ministry only considers full-time positions. Even worse, that does not include the fact that there may be as many as 4000 unqualified teachers that are currently employed within the public school system.

As a result, schools everywhere are struggling to find qualified educators, and must increasingly rely on unlicensed teachers, other school personnel, and, in some cases quite literally anyone to teach the Quebec curriculum. 

Naturally, the causes behind the teacher shortage in Quebec are both numerous and complex, not to mention beyond the scope of this article. However, a report from the Institut du Québec identifies four key factors, namely: the retirement of many experienced teachers due to Quebec’s aging population, the growing number of students in the public school system, the implementation of kindergarten classes for four-year-olds, and the declining number of university students graduating to become teachers. 

Broadly speaking, what makes the teacher shortage particularly difficult to address is that it clearly constitutes a positive feedback loop. Teachers are increasingly overburdened due to the current shortage, which encourages some of them to quit and further leads undergraduates to change programs, which ultimately only exacerbates the crisis. 

The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government has launched multiple reforms in the past few years to tackle the shortage, though it remains too early to tell whether they will be successful.

Currently, the main response by the CAQ is to incentivize undergraduate students to pursue studies in education, and for a good reason: between 2009 and 2018, the total number of undergraduates studying to become high school teachers has fallen by more than a quarter. Thus, since last fall, as part of the Bourse Perspective Québec (bursary) program, students enrolled in any education program are eligible to receive a lump sum of 2500 dollars for each full-time semester completed. 

Last year, the Ministry of Education also created a new master’s degree that allowed anyone already possessing a bachelor’s degree to become a certified teacher after two years of study. The reasoning behind this solution is that the regular four-year bachelor of education is considered to be an overly long and complicated way of becoming an educator for those already having a relevant academic background. Shortening the length of time required to gain teacher certification has, since then, become the main point of focus of the CAQ’s strategy to tackle the teacher shortage. 

Although the idea of creating shorter graduate programs leading to teacher certification seems like a somewhat logical and effective solution, it has led to some controversy. 

As Minister Drainville has recently stated, the CAQ is currently working on the eventual implementation of an even shorter graduate program, one that could be worth only 30 credits yet still lead to teacher certification. This has generated opposition by multiple actors in the field of education, who argue that such programs would lead to wide discrepancies in teacher training across the province. They rightly claim that a 30-credit program presents a stark contrast to the 120 (or 90) credit bachelor of education or even the 60-credit master’s degree, which both include a vast array of pedagogical tools and discipline-specific methods of education.

Of course, these are only short-term solutions aimed at reducing the shortage using whatever means available. It must be noted that this issue also provides a unique opportunity to address some of the long-term shortfalls of Quebec’s education system. 

For instance, surprisingly enough, none of the solutions suggested by Quebec’s government consider how future teachers are trained in the traditional bachelor of education. Research carried out in 2022 suggests that many students quit as a result of an overall lack of “coherence” in education programs. In other words, there exists a profound disconnect between intensive, theory-based learning in education programs and hands-on experience opportunities. In their field experiences, student-teachers tend to be exposed to difficult working conditions right from the start of their career, which prevents them from applying the numerous tools they acquired from their program and often ends with them changing programs. 

This same study further contends that low graduation rates in education (and other) programs can also be explained by the fact that 60% of CEGEP and university students in Quebec are affected by some form of anxiety or depression, a trend that was observed both pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. 

Thus, although handing out free undergraduate degrees in education and fast-tracking graduate programs to increase the rate of teacher certification are somewhat appropriate methods to urgently address the teacher shortage, the government of Quebec should not lose sight of the fact that reforms are in fact needed within the more “traditional” means of acquiring teacher certification, namely the bachelor of education. 

It seems rather evident that students in education need to be better supported in their journey to become teachers. This can be done not just by bridging the gap between theory and practice, but also by making sure that student-teachers are able to fully integrate within the classroom and build upon their new professional identity. Providing education students with elaborate theoretical approaches to education only to leave them with an unmanageable workload out in the field is not the way to go. 

In a rapidly-changing world, educators are responsible for guiding the generations of tomorrow, and constitute by themselves one of the most important pillars of any society. Before I changed programs last summer, I was a passionate, undergraduate education student myself. However, witnessing the Quebec government’s overall lack of consideration for both the teaching profession and education as a whole is a serious blow to any prospective teacher. It is then imperative that, once the shortage is addressed using the necessary measures, a province-wide discussion on the future of education follows suit.