E D U C AT I O N I N T E R N AT I O N A L
As illustrated in Table 3 below, higher percentages of civil servant status can be seen in primary and secondary education, whereas contractual status was recorded more often in ECE, VET, higher education, and among ESP. The employment of teachers on a contractual basis is becoming a common practice in many countries worldwide, while in Armenia, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Russia, Sweden and the UK, this kind of employment is the only one reported for most sectors of education. In some cases, public school teachers can be employed either as civil servants or contract employees, as for example in Australia, Brazil, the Cook Islands, Greece, Guinea, Haiti, France, Malawi, the Netherlands, Portugal, Senegal, the Solomon Islands, and Turkey.
TABLE 3 : Legal status of teachers Results by number of responses* Civil Servants
Contract employees
Number of respondent unions
Early childhood education teachers
30
26
45
Primary school teachers
44
25
55
Secondary school teachers
48
27
56
Vocational education and training teachers
30
23
40
Higher education teaching personnel
26
24
35
Education support personnel
21
18
28
*Unions could choose more than one response
40
The increasing number of teachers employed on fixed-term contracts is also evident in the unions’ open comments. In Greece, OLME reported that young entrants are increasingly employed in public schools for a period of a few months and are remunerated by EU-funded programmes. In Nepal, the NNTA noted that ECE teachers are employed only on a contractual basis because they are considered as ‘initiators’ and not teachers, while a significant number of teachers with a civil servant status are retiring and newly recruited teachers are employed on contract. In the Netherlands, AOb stated that the number of teachers hired on payroll constructions or as independent