Flemish education is going through stormy weather, a study by KU Leuven confirms once once more. The backlog has been hit by the corona crisis but not caught up, the best students are declining and the teacher shortage is accelerating all these trends.
Teacher shortage accelerates learning loss
Take an average primary school in Flanders. It has thirteen teachers. What happens to the learning performance of students if one of those thirteen posts remains open? This is the question that educational economists Kristof De Witte and Letizia Gambi of KU Leuven asked themselves. For the third year in a row they analyzed the tests that students take in the sixth year of Catholic education, the interdiocesan tests (IDP).
It is an obvious conclusion that such an unfilled vacancy in an average primary school does not do any good to the learning performance. What is new is that De Witte and Gambi were able to put a figure on this. “A world first”, they call it themselves. According to their analysis, a missing teacher leads to a learning loss of 2.1 weeks for Dutch and 2.6 weeks for mathematics. For reference: a school year consists of 37 teaching weeks. So that one absence has quite an impact.
The bad news is that more and more schools are suffering from the teacher shortage. Last year, seven out of ten schools had a vacancy open. A year earlier that was just over half of the schools.
“The teacher shortage is the greatest threat to the quality of education,” says Lieven Boeve, director-general of Catholic Education Flanders. “In addition, the shortage also complicates the effort that teachers have to make to deal with the consequences of the school closures.”
Loss of quality following corona continues
The decline in learning performance following corona continues. Except for the subject ‘people & society’, the learning performance of students has been falling for all subjects since 2019. “It is a cause for concern,” says De Witte. “We can’t get the tanker to turn around.” The learning loss for Dutch in 2022 is particularly striking. The average student lost 15 teaching weeks of knowledge in 2022 compared to a student in 2019. For reference: a school year consists of 37 teaching weeks. Worryingly, the decline in academic achievement seems to have accelerated for Dutch and mathematics last year.
“If students at the end of the second year, for example, have not sufficiently mastered the times tables, then a considerable amount of teaching time must be spent in the following year on remediation and automation of subject matter that must already be known,” says De Witte. “This leaves less time for new learning material. This increases the learning delay.”
Top performers fall down
In three years, the best-scoring students are almost an entire school year behind their predecessors in knowledge. That is the disturbing conclusion of De Witte and Gambi when they compare the results for Dutch among the absolute top students (the 5 percent best students) from 2022 with the top students from 2019. “We also saw that reflected in other studies,” says De White. “In 2003, 34 percent of our students were still among the best in the world for mathematics in the OECD’s PISA tests (that gauge the educational performance of 15-year-olds and compare this across national borders, PG). That was only 18.8 percent more in 2018.”
One hypothesis is that following the corona crisis, teachers primarily tried to brush up the weakest performing and most disadvantaged students so that they might transfer to the next grade. This left less time and energy for the bright ones in the class. “We really need to think regarding how we can fully challenge top performers once more,” says De Witte. “Research from Hungary shows that when they leave a class, it has a major effect on the performance of the entire class,” he says. “Primuses pull the rest of the group along, for example through the questions they ask.”
The teacher shortage reinforces this trend, especially in primary education. There it is often the care teacher who steps in when a teacher is not available. In secondary school, it is difficult for a music teacher to step in when no one is in front of the class for Latin. The problem in primary school, however, is that the care teacher cannot do his daily job, namely supporting underprivileged and weak students and challenging bright minds.
Teacher experience is crucial
It is an old problem in Flemish education: many teachers stop in the first five years of teaching. Those are the most difficult years, but also the most crucial to gain experience. In a school where more teachers work who have less than ten years of experience, students score less well on average on the interdiocesan tests, it appears.
Conversely, schools with more experienced teachers – in this case: more than 26 years on the counter – not only see less learning loss among pupils, those experienced teachers would even succeed in compensating for the backlog. It is important to know that Flanders has a structural flaw in that respect. The teaching staff of schools with many underprivileged pupils are on average younger and therefore less experienced.
According to the researchers, this also shows the changed intake in the teaching profession. “You can’t ignore that,” says Boeve. “The group that now teaches in primary education is a different group than before. Due to the democratization of higher education, certain people who used to stand in front of the class in primary school are now choosing to study speech therapy or pedagogy, for example.”
Boeve once once more commits his plea to pay people who have a master’s degree at master’s level in primary education. “That costs a few thousand euros more per year, per teacher,” he says. “That would make a big difference in attracting and retaining those profiles in primary education.”
Inequality is not declining
The fact that school closures and subsequent distance learning have widened the gap between the learning performance of disadvantaged and high-potential students was bad news for Flanders anyway. Studies such as PISA by the OECD have been telling us for years that the difference in educational performance between poor and rich students is as great in almost no other place in the world as in Flanders.
This inequality within schools and between students is still there, according to this research. The good news is that she didn’t get any bigger in 2022. The bad news is that it’s not getting any better. The inequality between schools did increase in 2022. The good news here is that the increase in that inequality slows down a bit every year.
