Number of teachers with immigrant background on the increase

Union suggests coordinated plan for teacher-training

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The number of teachers with immigrant backgrounds has been growing rapidly in Finland in recent years. However, they often have problems obtaining the supplementary education they would need in order to become qualified to teach in Finnish schools.
      Hence the Trade Union of Education in Finland (OAJ) has recently proposed that teachers of foreign origin should be offered nationally-coordinated supplementary education.
      "Teachers of foreign extraction are an asset to schools, and we should make good use of them. They are bound to increase the understanding of multiculturalism in the country. Naturally, they too should be qualified and have the necessary language skills, but the education they are currently offered is too fragmented", says Director Liisa Souri of OAJ.
     
Teachers working in Finland include a total of 800 foreign citizens and some hundreds of immigrants who have been granted Finnish citizenship.
      However, the share of foreign citizens among the employed members of the OAJ is only about one per cent. Recently, the Union conducted a questionnaire in order to find out their problems.
      The respondents were from around 40 countries. The majority of immigrants came from Russia, Estonia, Sweden, Great Britain, and Germany.
     
Only a small percentage
of them were born in Finland. Most of the arrivals had moved to Finland for family reasons or in order to take up a job.
      Two-thirds of the immigrants had graduated as teachers in some other country, while only some 20 percent of them had qualified for the profession in Finland. More than 10 percent of the teachers of foreign origin had no teaching degree at all.
      On the other hand, while almost two-thirds of the respondents replied that they had a teaching degree already when they moved to Finland, only one in five of them had completed additional studies in Finland.
     
Fewer than 60 percent of all respondents had demonstrated sufficient command of Finnish or Swedish through a National Certificate of Language Proficiency test, which is a condition leading to the qualification of a teacher in this country.
      Teachers of foreign background working at preschools and comprehensive schools are required to have excellent language skills, while at upper secondary schools and vocational schools a good command of the language of instruction is adequate.
      Half of the respondents worked at several schools, and only 50 percent of all respondents had a permanent position. Frequently, the job was part-time.
     
It came as a surprise to the OAJ that the majority, some 64 percent of all respondents, worked as teachers of Finnish pupils. The second biggest group consisted of teachers who taught foreign pupils their own native language.
      The total number of pupils with immigrant backgrounds in Finnish schools is currently around 35,000.


Links:
  Trade Union of Education in Finland (OAJ)

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