Education International Research
were already emerging in many German states, particularly at the primary school level. Increasingly, more than one adult is organising learning processes in a class. This led to a range of ad-hoc emergency measures. The reactivation of pensioners, job offers for lateral entrants without pedagogic qualifications, and temporary jobs for students and volunteers were strategies to cope with the gap between needed and available teachers. In particular, German lessons for new arrivals are often delivered by temporarily employed staff without full teacher qualification, and often with very limited training in teaching German as a foreign/ second language. At the same time, a range of lateral entrants gained teaching experience and often sought to improve their performance autodidactly. Wage levels and working conditions differ considerably. While staff shortages in general can only be addressed by more training and employment, we consider that the following points are important, specifically with regards to refugee integration. • In times of decreasing refugee arrivals, emergency measures should be replaced by long-term solutions. Persons who started teaching without adequate qualifications and who wish to stay in education should be offered opportunities to adjust their qualification – for example by targeted further training which can be undertaken while on the job. Even if a full teacher qualification may not be accessible for all affected parties, developments towards team-teaching and multiprofessional teamwork could offer new job opportunities in schools. A reconsideration of qualification patterns and career paths are worthy of discussion, in order to avoid the development of ‘paraprofessionals’ without a specified role, pay or education. • High refugee immigration numbers can create an impulse to consider new ways of adjusting teacher qualifications from abroad which currently involve lengthy periods of learning without pay. This is not attractive for foreign teachers from a different educational system with years of independent teaching experiences. As regular teachers have to fulfil a state-regulated preparatory service after their Master’s degree (called Referendariat), one idea is to develop a new type of state-regulated preparatory service for foreign teachers. It could be a paid alternative for complicated adjustment of qualification measures. Such a paid qualification phase could, for example, be for three years and include German as a second language, familiarisation with the German system, and additional training in subject content and teaching methods in a regular timetable.
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