Union, opposition politicians pressure Nova Scotia to create teacher recruitment strategy

The Nova Scotia Teachers Union is calling for a recruitment and retention strategy.

Nova Scotia’s schools have been under growing pressure, ever since the province’s population surged by more than 100,000 people since the COVID-19 pandemic. Student enrolment has also risen by 10,000 over those past four years.

But when it comes to staffing and teacher recruitment and retention, the provincial government says there’s been some progress. The top bureaucrat in the Department of Education says they have enough teachers to staff every classroom, with more than 10,000 full-time teachers and 3,000 substitutes, adding the province issued roughly 850 teaching certificates last year.

“Growth in the school system has now stabilized at a more predictable and manageable level,” said Tracey Barbrick, deputy minister with the Department of Education and Early Childhood Education.

But unions and opposition politicians say more needs to be done.

“We can’t recruit our way out of a shortage, if we continue to lose teachers at the current rate,” said Peter Day, president of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union.

During a human resources committee meeting held Tuesday it was revealed a joint committee studying recruitment and retention completed its work before the school year, producing recommendations for the department and the teachers union. But the NDP questioned why the report hasn’t been made public yet.

“By her own admission, the deputy minister said there were no state secrets in that document,” said NDP MLA Paul Wozney. “Why not share the common goals the union and government are working on so everyone knows what solutions are being developed?”

Barbrick said the recruitment and retention committee was formed as part of an agreement in the most recent collective bargaining agreement signed with the teachers union. She added the recommendations were made under an advisory to the department and never meant to be made public or part of a report.

“And numerous recommendations from the combined parties is work that is now being underway,” she said.

Both the NSTU and NDP urge the province to create a detailed strategy to address teacher recruitment and retention.

“There is an appetite to collaborate wholeheartedly on these kinds of solutions and so why not just put them on the table so we all know what the measuring stick is and we can see when the goal is met,” said Wozney.

The province says it is tracking staffing closely and has created a new data and analytics team to better understand the needs of the public school system and they don’t need “a glossy document” to move things forward.

“We’ve got more teachers than we’ve had before, we have less gaps in supply than we had before, and so it’s moving in the right direction,” said Barbrick.

Barbrick told the committee the data shows three per cent or about 140 teachers retired last year, while 1.5 per cent of teachers left the profession for other reasons which the department couldn’t determine.

Barbrick said they plan to implement a better exit strategy to understand why some teachers decided to leave the system.

But in the meantime, they are increasing the number of teachers graduating from universities in the province each year and, since 2021, have more than doubled the number of bachelor of education seats from 300 to nearly 600 seats.

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