School principal says teacher workload outweighs pay concerns

Growing workloads are the main reason teachers burn out and leave the profession, Rando Kuustik, principal of Jakob Westholm Gymnasium, told ERR’s current affairs programme Aktuaalne kaamera.

Kuustik said his school had all its subject teachers in place for the new school year, making it one of the fortunate schools. However, he said recruiting teachers had become difficult across the board, with natural sciences and mathematics among the hardest subjects to staff. Foreign-language teachers were also difficult to find.

He said school leaders were still looking for teachers and support specialists just days or weeks before the start of the school year. In some schools, teachers may be asked to teach subjects outside their usual field. Kuustik said it was possible that a music teacher could teach physics, depending on their qualifications, although he did not know how common this was.

According to Kuustik, workload has become a more pressing issue than pay, even though salaries remain important.

“What tasks are we taking away from teachers and schools, and whose responsibility are they? That needs to be thought through soon, and very quickly,” he said.

Kuustik said schools should perhaps no longer be expected to function largely as social welfare institutions. Responsibilities that require specialist expertise should instead be handled by the appropriate professionals, he said, allowing schools to focus on helping young people become thinking adults.

Asked who was responsible when a young person did not have a school place, Kuustik said there was no single answer. He said the issue required examining how the problem or system failure had emerged and the roles of the many people involved.

On the use of artificial intelligence in schools, Kuustik said the issue required a broader social agreement on how much technology should be used and how much independent thinking should be retained. Schools should focus on ensuring that students’ ability to analyse does not disappear, he said.

He added that teachers had differing views of artificial intelligence. Some welcomed the opportunity to analyse the mistakes made by such systems, while others remained highly critical of their use.