A thousand teachers demonstrate on the streets of Ostend
Around 1,000 members of the teacher profession gathered in Ostend (West Flanders) on Wednesday morning to take part in a demonstration against proposals set out in a report to professionalise and modernise the work of teachers working in Flemish schools. The demonstration in Ostend follows a demonstration against the recommendations made in the “Commission of the Learned’s” report that took place in Antwerp on Tuesday. There around 4,000 teaching staff took to the streets.
Further demonstrations are planned on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week in Leuven (Flemish Brabant), Hasselt (Limburg Province) and Ghent (East Flanders). All three unions that represent Flemish teachers reject the report’s proposals and say that their members’ have not been heard. The report by the Commission of the Learned was commissioned by the Flemish Education Minister Ben Weyts (nationalist).
In a statement the unions says that "The proposals put forward by the Commission of the Learned are, for many members of the teaching profession, the very opposite of what is required. Teaching staff, the real experts here, are once again not being listened to by politicians”.
The Commission of the Learned made some 70 recommendations. They include assigning teachers to education boards rather than to a specific school, creating an "induction year" at the start of their career, defining a full-time job as being a 38-hour week, and professionalising the post of headteachers by creating a greater salary differential between them and other staff.
The Flemish Education Minister Ben Weyts says he does not understand why the unions demonstrating against the independent commission’s recommendations.