Amsterdam’s city council has asked Syrian refugees and civil servants to serve as substitute teachers in order to combat shortages in the classroom.
The Dutch capital has been hit by a teacher shortage, which has particularly affected primary schools.
Before the summer holidays, schools were looking to recruit 300 teachers, a number which has now dropped to 122.
In order to tackle the shortfall, the council said it would draft in 60 civil servants, only four of which are qualified teachers, to help out.
It also said 15 Syrian refugees who had previously worked as teachers would teach maths, chemistry and physics.
Marjolein Moorman, Amsterdam’s councillor for education, told the Volkskrant newspaper that as a result “on Monday when schools start, every child will have a teacher”.
It comes as part of a raft of measures, such as merging classes, putting part-time teachers on for longer hours and increasing the number of tasks given to classroom assistants.
“It is a fragile system and we hope a flu epidemic will not strike Amsterdam quite yet,” Joke Middelbeek from the primary schools association BBO told the newspaper.
“We don’t want to send pupils home for lack of a teacher nor do we want the level of education to suffer because the children are being taught by unqualified staff.”
