Zug,19.03.2018

Teachers found working without due qualifications

The Cantonal Inspectorate of Schools (SKZ) has discovered three teachers who have been carrying out their profession without being duly qualified. The schools involved have since taken appropriate action.
 
The Cantonal Department of Education (KBD) announced on Friday that over the course of this current academic year it SKZ had been looking at all those who teach pupils of compulsory school age in both municipal and private schools to check they were appropriately qualified to do so. In all, documentation relating to 90 staff, 79 form teachers and 11 specialising in remedial education, was examined. It was discovered that in 96.7% of cases teachers were in possession of a teaching certificate, though only 93.4% of them with one appropriate to the age of the children they were teaching. In 3.3% of cases the lack of appropriate certification was deemed to be serious, and quite serious in a further 3.3% of cases. In 28.9% of cases the discrepancies were deemed slight only.

As to these serious cases, this referred to situations where staff were teaching without being in possession of a Zug cantonal or other cantonal or foreign teaching certificate or without a limited or non-limited permit to teach
 
Less serious cases included those where members of staff did not have the appropriate limited or non-limited permit to teach as issued by the KBD, especially in those instances where they were teaching children of an age they were not qualified to.
 
By “slight” the SKZ said this included, for example, the lack of having a permit to teach for a particular time limit for the individual subject as issued by the head teacher at the appropriate school.
 
What was noticed was that more failings in these areas were found in private schools, which needed to demonstrate particular care when engaging staff with foreign qualifications.
 
Commenting on these findings, the head of the KDB, Stefan Schleiss of the SVP party, said he was happy that only relatively few infringements had been discovered, though naturally appropriate improvements would have to be made.

On a separate matter, though still one relating to schooling, Katrin Meier, who heads the Education and Science Committee of the VPOD public service workers’ union, said over the weekend that many teachers in Switzerland were “on the edge of exhaustion”.