Tough lesson: Thousands of ‘unqualified’ teachers in Quebec schools

By Canadian Press on January 11, 2025.

MONTREAL — Monique Henry has been teaching English in Quebec for the better part of two decades without official certification. As a so-called “unqualified” teacher, she has had to learn her profession the hard way.

When she started teaching in 2006 she struggled with unruly students. As she never completed a university education program, she didn’t learn classroom management techniques.

“You kind of just do it on the fly and learn with time,” said Henry, 46, who teaches English as a second language at a high school in St-Jérôme, Que., on a yearlong contract. “There’s no one to help you out . … If you have a problem, you’re kind of on your own.”

Henry is one of a growing number of unqualified teachers in Quebec schools who, education experts say, the provincial government is increasingly reliant on as the teaching shortage gets worse, putting the quality of education at risk and exhausting school staff.

Unqualified teachers could have university degrees in non-teaching subjects, or no post-secondary education at all. They come from a wide array of backgrounds but have one thing in common: they aren’t officially certified by the provincial government to teach.

Traditionally, teachers in Quebec become certified after completing a bachelor’s degree in education and obtaining a teaching licence. In response to the labour shortages in the education system, the province has lowered the bar to getting that designation, but there is little incentive for unqualified teachers to become certified because they are in such demand that school boards are hiring regardless of a candidate’s educational background.

In December, the Quebec Education Department said there were 9,184 unqualified teachers in the province’s public schools, up from 8,871 in May 2024 and 6,654 in May 2023. But that number only includes teachers on longer-term contracts and excludes substitutes, who make up the bulk of unqualified teachers.

In 2023, Quebec’s auditor general released a report revealing that in the 2020-21 school year there were more than 30,000 unqualified teachers in the education network, mostly substitutes, a number that represented more than one-quarter of all teachers.

Nicolas Prévost, president of the Quebec federation of school administrators, said he expects the number of unqualified teachers to significantly increase in the next few years because of low enrolment in university education programs and the provincial government’s difficulty replacing retiring teachers.

Geneviève Sirois, professor of school management at Université TÉLUQ, agrees. “We are very dependent on unqualified teachers right now.” In 2015, Quebec had about 15,000 unqualified teachers; that number doubled in less than a decade, she said.

Although unqualified teachers vary greatly in professional experience, Sirois said those without proper training can hinder student learning.

“Just imagine a first grader who needs to learn how to read and write and ends up with a teacher with no knowledge of pedagogical principles, reading and writing …. When it comes to students with difficulties, we can see the potential consequences right away,” she said.

In Montreal, unqualified teacher Matthieu Théorêt, 47, has previously held two long-term contracts but prefers to substitute. Unqualified teachers often show up for duty after the school year has begun with no time to prepare, he said. That means they are in many cases dependent on classwork and information provided by their colleagues.

Some teachers at the Montreal high school Théorêt works at helped him last academic year but were too busy — or exhausted — to help this year. He doesn’t blame them. “They took lots of time from their work to help me and to help the other teachers that came before me and they were exhausted,” he said, admitting that he sometimes feels like a burden.

The strain isn’t limited to fellow teachers but to secretaries and other support staff as well. “Everybody has to pick up some kind of organizational slack,” he said.

Sirois, meanwhile, said new university programs have been created at the request of the province to fast-track certification for teachers, adding that the government is granting provisional teaching licences to students enrolled in teacher training programs.

But there is little incentive for unqualified teachers to become certified, says Valérie Harnois, a PhD candidate at Laval University who studies how the province is responding to the teacher shortage. There is so much demand for teachers, she said, that unqualified people get regular work and close to the same pay as teachers who have education degrees and licences.

“There’s very little advantage from the financial standpoint to be legally qualified,” Harnois said.

In a statement, the education department said Quebec is spending millions of dollars to recruit and retain workers: $39.6 million to make part-time positions more attractive, $37 million to keep retired teachers on the job, and another $37 million to support teaching staff.

Henry is on track to finally get her teaching licence. A few years ago, she temporarily quit teaching to take a job as a 911 dispatcher, but she was drawn back to the classroom by a new remote-learning bachelor’s degree program at Université de Sherbrooke. “I always wanted to go into teaching,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 11, 2025.

Joe Bongiorno, The Canadian Press