Education: Hope for newcomers in Europe
Conclusions for union activities
As a union, GEW is highly engaged in negotiations about the salaries and working conditions of its members. But it also considers its members’ interest in statefunded high-quality education for all and professional training and development as a starting point. Therefore, union activities include advocacy to ensure equal opportunities and access to all levels of public education as well as participatory projects to identify the challenges in schools with teachers and other professionals on the ground. Refugees with a professional education background are considered potential colleagues and future members. The union engages with them in pilot projects and fosters solidarity and mutual cooperation. A key challenge, due to staff shortages and resource constraints, is to tackle the growing responsibilities and increasing workload in the different education sectors. At the same time, it is a challenge to balance the needs of new education staff who came to teaching as career changers or as professionals who often have received shorter (teacher) training in their countries of origin, and the need to maintain established professional standards. As a consequence of refugee immigration, we consider that the following issues are particularly worthy of union attention: • With their commitment to solidarity and joint action, unions are in a unique position for advocacy in favour of quality education for all and against all forms of discrimination, both within the membership and towards stakeholders in politics and civil society. They are also in a good position to warn about consequences of migration policy choices for the education sector. • Unions are continuously negotiating professional standards, career and wage structures with – in the German case mostly public – employers. Recent refugee immigration has added new challenges to these negotiations – namely through the rapid increase of temporarily employed staff without usually required training and through immigration of experienced refugee teachers with foreign qualifications. If unions manage to organise such groups and find targeted training and career pathways for them, their traditional membership can be relieved of the pressure of staff shortages while maintaining professional standards. • Unions can channel information in two directions – they can transfer their memberships’ concerns about school integration of refugees to policy makers and the research community, and they can initiate A 37