Job market for new teachers tightens
Enrolment increases offset by ongoing budget decreases
When it comes to figuring out how many teachers we need and where, Mark Bevan has many of the answers.
Bevan is the director of workforce planning and development with Alberta Education and has spent the past seven years analyzing data and distilling trends to keep ahead of what Alberta’s K-12 system needs. The effort has been successful.
There are about the right number of jobs here each year for Alberta’s graduates, unlike in Ontario where the government is halving admissions to teacher colleges because many graduates can’t find work in their field.
In British Columbia and Nova Scotia as well, too many prospective teachers are competing for too few jobs.
Here in Alberta, about 2,000 students graduate each year with a bachelor of education degree, although about 500 don’t begin working as teachers for various reasons. School districts hire approximately 2,000 to 2,100 teachers in Alberta annually and have to recruit from outside the province to fill about 500 to 700 jobs, Bevan said.
Teachers tend to be in high demand if they have expertise in math, career and technology studies, second languages, senior sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology and skill working with students with special needs, he said.
“We have enough teachers, but we don’t have enough teachers going to to right places or maybe enough teachers with the right skills, so there becomes a bit of an imbalance of making sure that we have people going to where the jobs are.”
Recent graduates often want jobs in larger centres such as Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton. Many aren’t willing to move to northern and rural communities where jobs are plentiful, Bevan said.
“I think there’s a sense of frustration from some that there are no jobs, yet we find year after year we’re recruiting from outside of the province to make sure that we’ve got enough teachers to cover those communities where it’s tougher to recruit to, and those are northern and rural communities.”
Thanks to Alberta’s attractive economy and a recent baby boom, enrolment in K-12 classrooms continues to climb. The provincial government estimates enrolment will climb over the next 10 years to about 710,000 students from about 600,000.
Many teachers are retiring, about 1,000 a year.
It should be a rosy job market for this year’s bachelor of education grads, but teaching positions are actually being cut, said Alberta Teachers’ Association president Carol Henderson.
Preliminary numbers indicate about 300 teaching jobs will be gone by fall and that number is expected to rise as more school boards approve costcutting budgets for 2013-14, Henderson said.
“We’re hearing from across the province too that a lot of the first-year teachers have been told, don’t count on anything for next year, which is really disappointing for those teachers,” she said.
“We know there are going to be 11,000 new students (in the fall), that’s the Alberta Education prediction, and we also know boards are facing huge cutbacks, with $14.5 million fewer dollars across the province than last year.”
Parents will see the results next fall with larger classes, Henderson said.
Edmonton public school trustees are discussing a proposed budget Tuesday that could cut 339 full-time jobs including 182 teaching positions. Enrolment in Edmonton Public Schools expected to rise by about 1,220 students this fall for a total of 84,661 children.
Trustees heard last week about 70 per cent of the 182 teaching positions could be cut through resignations and retirements but most of the other teaching job losses would be for contract teachers on probation.
About 55 of the district’s 255 probationary contract teachers would lose their jobs but get first priority for substitute teaching jobs and be first in line for future contracts, trustees were told.
Andy Mikula just graduated with his bachelor of education degree and was vice-president of the education students’ association at the U of A until the end of April.
It’s disheartening to hear jobs are being chopped when enrolment is going up, he said.
“It’s tough, in Edmonton especially, with budget cuts,” Mikula said. “They’re cutting staff so it’s not looking good.”
The 27-year-old former summer camp counsellor volunteers and coaches basketball at an Edmonton junior high school.
He worked for about five years in information technology and took two years of computer science in Vancouver before transferring to the University of Alberta where he just finished his education degree.
Mikula’s dream job is to teach high school computer science and math in Edmonton. He grew up in the capital and his girlfriend teaches here, but he is prepared to a move to find work.
“It would be nice to stay in the city but, at the end of the day, I need to be working somewhere, so I’m sort of broadening my search.”