About a third of teachers in Austrian schools work part-time. This is evident from the answer to a parliamentary question from NEOS by Education Minister Martin Polaschek (ÖVP). The number of part-time workers is particularly high at the beginning of their professional careers, ie at the age when graduates start their careers or tend to scale back their jobs because of their own younger children.
According to this, the part-time share in the 2021/22 school year was 33 percent at local elementary schools, 27 percent at middle schools, 35 percent at AHS, and 30 percent at secondary and higher vocational schools (BMHS). According to the answer to the question, the ratios have remained stable in recent years.
Part-time work means any form of work other than a full hour. This ranges from the pastor, who teaches one or two religion lessons at the local elementary school, to the math teacher, who reduces her teaching effort by just one lesson per week.
Younger teachers in particular work part-time
As expected, part-time work is particularly common among younger teachers. This is partly due to the fact that under the new service law, young teachers must complete a master’s degree within a certain period of time parallel to their lessons if they start their career immediately after obtaining their bachelor’s degree. Usually, children start their own families between the ages of 30 and 40, which is why part-time education is also becoming more common.
The data shows that part-time work in the education sector is also predominantly a female job: in the public education sector (primary school, secondary school, special school, polytechnic, vocational school) there are 21,000 female part-time teachers compared to only 3,000 males. There are 10,000 part-time teachers and nearly 4,000 teachers at the AHS and BMHS. This is a significantly larger overhang than would be expected given the already higher overall number of female teachers.
Education spokeswoman Martina Künsberg Sarre of NEOS called on the government to “improve the framework conditions in such a way that it becomes attractive for more teachers to take on higher education obligations”. This has consequences for the modern working conditions at the school, for example, but also for the rapid development of national high-quality childcare.
“This is not only important from the point of view of education policy, for example to compensate for the teacher shortage, but it must also be a socio-political goal that more women are represented on the labor market. We are not going to solve the teacher shortage with advertising campaigns,” Künsberg Sarre told the APA.
Source: Krone
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