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More and more teachers are complaining about exhaustion

Photo: Eckhard Stengel May 3, 2023 00 : 00 is entitled to issue a simple usage license at the time of provision. Personality and trademark rights as well as copyright laws regarding art-works shown must be observed. Commercial use at your own risk. / Eckhard Stengel hh : mm spiegel.de usable Tue July 11, 2023 ftpbildeingang Thu February 15, 2024 companion / Eckhard Stengel / IMAGO

60 percent of school administrators in Germany see an increase in long-term, illness-related absences among their staff. This applies to both physical and mental illnesses. This emerges from a survey by the opinion research institute Forsa on behalf of the Association for Education and Upbringing (VBE). For this purpose, more than 1,300 school principals were surveyed according to representative criteria.

These values ​​have increased significantly compared to the survey times in 2019 and 2021. In 2019, just over a third of those surveyed said that illnesses had increased. In 2021 it was half that.

At the same time, only a quarter of the school management surveyed stated that they had sufficient options to protect the health of their employees. You therefore wish

  • that their teachers

    have to take on

    fewer administrative tasks

  • and to be able

    to distribute additional work more fairly among the staff

    .

Bring health professionals into schools

“We know about the efforts of many school management, but their options are limited – and so are their resources,” says association chairman Gerhard Brand. It is therefore necessary to bring more staff into schools. “Different professions can best share tasks and thus do the best for each child.” If teachers are to endure the “marathon of around 40 years of service,” better working conditions are needed. The current shortage of teachers and the increase in tasks felt like a “never-ending hurdle.”

Brand sees responsibility primarily in politics: “It’s not something that the school management can simply decide. “The administrations have a duty to reduce bureaucratic hurdles in order to reduce the burden,” says the head of the association. It would also make sense to bring health professionals into schools who would also keep an eye on teachers, the association demands.

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