The lack of teachers creates risks for ensuring quality education in Latvia. How to solve the problem if the age of teachers in Latvia exceeds the average in many places in the world, but young specialists enter schools slowly? Riga Technical University (RTU) researchers have created an analytical tool for forecasting the demand and supply of pedagogues in general and professional education institutions and modeling the employment of pedagogues in the short, medium and long term until 2050, on the order of the Ministry of Education and Science. This would allow reducing the mismatch between supply and demand.
57% of teachers in general secondary education programs in Latvia are 50 years old and older, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD average is 39 years. In addition, the proportion of older teachers is increasing. The number of young specialists in schools is small - educators aged 18 to 40 make up only a quarter of the total, as also shown by the analysis of RTU researchers, creating the innovative tool for modeling the demand and supply of educators. The workload and qualifications of the teachers are also different, which is influenced by the subjects, the number of students, the position and the specialization of the educational institution.
"Preparing teachers according to modern school requirements is a priority of the ministry. A new type of teacher is a leader who is able to inspire children and, under the teacher's guidance, to move children from indoctrination to an active cognitive process. When planning the training of new pedagogues, several factors must be taken into account, such as changes in the teaching content, transition to a unified school, transition to EU foreign languages as a second foreign language. In this process of change, it is important to use and analyze such data that allow us to make sustainable and long-lasting decisions," emphasizes Jānis Paiders, Deputy State Secretary of the Ministry of Education and Science.
The new model consists of five interrelated models that describe the demand for teachers – learner module and subjects – supply – teacher module and teacher education module – and funding.
While creating the modeling tool, the researchers collected and analyzed a large amount of data on the teachers employed in the general and vocational education system, the learners, the education system itself, identified various policy instruments and interviewed industry professionals, obtaining the "mental models" of the system participants, or their understanding of how it works system. They also gathered and evaluated stakeholders such as educators, heads of educational institutions, learners, their parents, municipalities, etc. needs to be addressed by the model. When building the model, the structure of the system dynamics model and mathematical equations were created, policy makers' interfaces where, by changing the values, different performance indicators can be modeled, as well as visualizations of the results, which allow them to assess the impact of the policy on the operation of the education system and make data-based decisions of educational institutions, municipalities and at the national level.
The tool has been validated by educational policy makers at the municipal and national level. RTU researchers have also carried out simulations, concluding that even if all teachers worked full-time or even more, they would have double competence and their ability to work simultaneously in several schools, both at the primary and secondary school levels, would still be in Latvia where there will be a mismatch between demand and supply. This discrepancy is especially noticeable in rural districts with smaller schools and greater distances between them. To improve the situation, the learning of individual subjects could be organized simultaneously for a larger number of students, teachers could be employed in several educational institutions and they could be motivated to improve their education and retrain in order to be able to teach subjects for which there is a greater demand, simulations show.
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