Throughout negotiation, and ultimately job action, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) and government’s Teacher Employer Bargaining Association (TEBA) haven’t agreed on much, but both parties acknowledge the need to hire more teachers in Alberta.

Among other agreements, a deal proposed to teachers by government included a clause to hire 3,000 new teachers over three years, on top of the hiring required to replace retiring teachers. When ATA members voted to reject the deal on Sept. 29, ultimately leading to the Oct. 6 teachers’ strike, ATA President Jason Schilling called the figure a “drop in the bucket” compared to the number of teachers needed in Alberta.

Between southern Alberta’s main education programs, including the University of Calgary, Mount Royal University and the University of Lethbridge, approximately 758 new teachers graduate annually, a large portion of the widely negotiated 1,000 teachers hired annually, but a fraction of the 5,000 overall teachers Schilling said are needed to fit an ideal student-teacher ratio.

The ATA could not provide detailed comment on the hiring process for potential teachers. TEBA received LWC’s request for hiring clarification, but did not provide comment before set publication date.

Increasing Alberta-trained teaching grads overall is possible at the university level, but will take heavy government funding, said university leaders.

According to UCalgary’s Werklund School of Education’s Dean, Dianne Gereluk, talks with the government are always ongoing, both during teachers’ strike talk and otherwise, and all parties agree on the need to address Alberta’s teacher shortage. 

The Werklund School of Education would love to increase its annual grad production, according to Gereluk, but consistently turns away qualified applicants because of enrollment limits and limited funding. 

“With additional government funding, our school of education could further expand cohort sizes,” she said.

“Currently, there is a strong demand for our Bachelor of Education programs, our various pathways into it, both the four year, the five year, the two year after degree year, community based programs, but enrolment caps currently force us to turn away qualified applicants across all of our bachelor of education pathways.”

Mount Royal University’s education program is dedicated to growing with the province, but increased enrolment must not compromise the quality of education they provide, according to a school-issued statement.

“Embracing the challenge to meet learner demand means we must manage growth carefully and consider the University’s personnel capacity, infrastructure limitations, and financial resources,” the statement reads.

Where will all the teachers come from?: ULeth dean

Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge, Lisa Starr, said that a nationwide negative rhetoric surrounding teaching has caused a decline in applications to the school’s education program.

“If you think about the amount of time labour action has been happening, or discussions about the working conditions for teachers, that’s not unique to Alberta, and I think the public is hearing it, and who wants to be a teacher when all of this is so hard, and I think it’s really hurting us,” she said. 

“Given that negativity and that decline we’ve seen, we’re definitely resourced to our maximum capacity. This is one of the interesting developments in this (Alberta teachers strike talk) of ‘we’re going to add 3000 teachers to the province,’ which has been widely shared in the negotiations, and the question we’re asking is, where are those 3,000 coming from?”

Like Gereluk, Starr said that ULeth has room to expand its education program, but needs adequate resources. 

“Our operating budget has been cut year after year and in the three years that I’ve been the dean, we’ve had no increases, no seat expansion, no increase to funding in post secondary, so we’re really limited, we’re maxed out with what we can do,” she said.

“We want to take more, but we need the resources from the province to be able to do that.”

With adequate funding, the program could accept an increased number of students as quickly as they could hire staff to teach them. Starr said that currently, the school has 32 full-time staff in the Faculty of Education.

“If we could get that increase to the operating budget, we can hire more people, we can take more students and increase the number of cohorts. With our early years program, for example, we had over 120 applications last year, but we only have 40 seats. If we had increased capacity, we could take 120 people, but we just don’t have the resources to hire those extra people right now,” she said.

Starr said that if 1,000 new-teachers-hired-annually is agreed upon by the ATA and the TEBA, then ULeth will do whatever they can to support the hiring process.

“Without the profession, a faculty of education doesn’t exist, so we will take as many students as we can to help to address that,” she said.

“But there’s also a retention question. We can take students and prepare them, but you hear this statistic quite often that a number of people leave the profession within five years. We can’t change that, and so even if we take more students, we can’t guarantee that they’re going to stay in the profession.”

Things that are currently being negotiated upon with government, including classroom student caps, policy to address classroom complexity and inflation-competitive salary will all be keys to province-wide teacher retention, says Starr.

Career changing comes in waves: UCalgary

Through government policies like the Bridge to Teacher Certification Program, which allows school authorities to sponsor and hire journey-certificated tradespeople to teach Career and Technology Studies while studying for teacher certification, potential for widespread industry-professionals becoming teacher-certified is possible. Gereluk said that typically, the University of Calgary has seen phases of professionals changing their careers.

“The numbers of individuals who change mid-career from trades tends to be fairly small. Currently, we have seen it in cycles, particularly when the oil and gas sector is down. So in the mid 2010s, we did see mid-career changes, particularly from geophysicists, those in the oilpatch, but it tends to be counter cyclical to the broader economic climate that we see those changes,” she said.

“Otherwise, it is not the vast majority of individuals.”