There is a “chronic shortage” of substitute teachers in Luxembourg’s primary schools, a union representing teachers has warned, with absences unable to be covered on more than 2,500 occasions during the last school year.
Citing a response from Education Minister Claude Meisch to a parliamentary question from LSAP deputy Ben Polidori, the SEW, the education arm of the OGBL union, said that during the 2024-25 school year, no substitute could be found for a teacher who was absent from primary school on 2,589 occasions.
“This is a worrying record,” the SEW said.
Indeed, according to Meisch’s answer, the number of times substitute teachers were unavailable is constantly rising. In the previous school year, no substitute teachers could be found on 1,247 occasions.
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Meisch said there were a total of 363 substitute primary school teachers available across the Grand Duchy for the current school year.
Catalogue of challenges
But the union says that the problem is not just a matter of lack of staff and acknowledged that the education ministry has been making efforts to recruit enough teachers to alleviate the problem. “At the same time, a growing number of teachers are being assigned to roles that are far removed from direct teaching,” the SEW wrote.
But a catalogue of challenges must be surmounted to attract substitute teachers, according to the union. Firstly, they are offered successive fixed-term contracts, with no limit on either their number or their duration.
Secondly, according to the SWE there have often been delays – sometimes of several months – in the payment of salaries for substitutes. In addition, supply teachers at certain levels and even with a permanent contract, “cannot benefit from civil servant status as things stand.”
The union has also highlighted the fact that there is “a total lack of replacements” for other essential staff at schools, such as teachers for pupils with special education needs.
A list of demands from the SEW includes an amendment to the Labour Code to remove the exception that currently allows for repeated fixed-term contracts, the implementation of a replacement solution for all staff at primary schools, and a scheme to bring teachers back into the classrooms, “where they are most needed”, the union said.
