It is not only pupils who are on tenterhooks before the start of the next school year. A number of high schools teachers do not know whether they will still have a job in September. Neither unions nor the Ministry of Education were able to provide a figure for the number of teachers and other staff to be fired. Officials at high schools estimate that at least several dozen of them will be given the sack.
A drop in the number of pupils is one reason for the lay-offs
The high schools in Ivančna Gorica and Nova Gorica, the High School of Economics in Ljubljana, the Vocational and Technical High School in Murska Sobota and the Ptuj School Centre are among those high schools that are overstaffed. The Ptuj School Centre alone will lay off 12 employees by the end of the month, 10 of them teachers.
Branko Kumer, the director of the Ptuj School Centre, said that especially High Schools of Economics currently have too many teachers but not enough pupils: “There are fewer pupils than in the past. It keeps adding up over the years. In the past 18 months, the European Social Fund has not offered any grants or invited tenders for projects, which is something we used to do in the past.”
More pupils but still too many teachers
More pupils will enrol in primary schools and high schools this year, but due to the government’s commitment to austerity measures, schools keep swapping excess teachers and staff. More and more teachers teach at two schools. According to Nives Počkar, the director of the Ljubljana School Centre, the Ministry of Education expects teachers to work 23 or more hours a week, which is more than is required. The Ministry is reluctant to allow schools to hire new teachers, and most of them have fixed-term contracts. Hence, Počkar is not upbeat about hiring new teachers.
The number of registered unemployed teachers currently stands at 1,760, but there are only 226 jobs available for them. Since schools cannot provide jobs for most of them, they will need to find a job outside their field, the Employment Agency said.