(Montreal) The education of students arriving at CEGEP is not at the level it normally should be, a “perverse effect” of the pandemic, estimates the Federation of College Education, which represents CEGEP teachers.
Posted 11:58am Updated 12:06pm
Marie-Eve Morasse The press
“In recent years, many students have walked through high school with lower expectations. There were no failures, diplomas were awarded, but without reaching the thresholds normally expected. Everything had been crushed,” Youri Blanchet, President of the Federation of Collegial Education (FEC-CSQ), said in a news conference on Monday.
Students starting college in the coming days will have completed part of their secondary education remotely due to the pandemic. Already in the CEGEP classes “it shows”, continues Mr. Blanchet. “We sense a loss of quality in the student profession,” he explains.
“Study skills: being able to do research, pay attention in class, take notes. This is also an observation that is shared [par les profs] ‘ says the president of the union.
As a result, “teachers are arranging workshops to give additional classes to teach the subject,” he says.
The Centrale des unions du Québec (CSQ) and its affiliated unions in the higher education sector met with the media in Montreal on Monday morning to argue that staff shortages are not just affecting primary and secondary schools.
“There are bottlenecks everywhere, including in the college network,” says Éric Gingras, President of the CSQ.
The union cannot quantify the extent of the shortage, but assures that the situation at certain universities is “very, very worrying”, for example in the computer science, pharmacy or nursing courses. It has happened, says the CSQ, that students have been excluded from classes for a few weeks due to a lack of teachers.
As negotiations to renew collective agreements neared, the CSQ and its associations are calling on the government to improve the working conditions and salaries of its members in order to create genuine staff attractiveness and retention.
With the Canadian Press