As of: February 12, 2024, 4:48 a.m
By: Lennart Schwenck
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Germany suffers from a teacher shortage.
Two teachers are suing due to excessive workload.
The teachers' association is calling for serious changes.
Stuttgart – Two high school teachers from Baden-Württemberg have filed a lawsuit before the Stuttgart administrative court.
The two teachers are seeking to have the court officially determine whether their working hours exceed the prescribed weekly working hours.
To date, there is no formal recording of working hours for teachers.
The two teachers from the Stuttgart district have recorded their working hours precisely over the past few years.
It turned out that both of them worked more than 2,000 hours a year, as the state chairman of the Philologists' Association (PhV) Ralf Scholl
explained to the
Schwäbische Zeitung
.
To understand: the annual working time for civil servants is only 1,800 hours.
To counteract the shortage of teachers: more and more career changers are teaching at German schools.
© Imago
Teachers' Association criticizes: No reliable recording of teachers' working hours
From Scholl's point of view, the complaining teacher and the complaining teacher are not isolated cases.
“The vast majority of teachers cannot cope with the 41-hour week,” says Scholl.
The long working hours are also one of the reasons why teachers are among the professional groups with the highest burnout rates.
The head of the association referred to a ruling by the Federal Labor Court from September 2022, which established the mandatory recording of working hours in Germany.
In April of last year, the Federal Ministry of Labor presented a draft law that stipulates that working hours will be recorded electronically in the future.
As early as September 2023, Scholl expressed his wish that teachers' working hours would finally be reliably recorded.
According to a forecast by the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK), the teacher shortage in Germany will continue to worsen until 2035.
The number of students is increasing more than expected.
This means that there will probably be a shortage of 68,000 teachers by 2035.
The part-time quota for teachers reached 42.3 percent in the 2022/23 school year.
The Standing Scientific Commission (SWK) of the KMK therefore recommends radical emergency measures.
This also includes a restriction on part-time teaching staff in order to counteract the shortage.
Relaxation is only expected in primary schools.
(ls with dpa
)