Teacher shortages in schools across Europe have received considerable policy and media attention in recent months (e.g., European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2022; Jack & Cocco, 2022). Despite strong political consensus over the need to attract quality candidates to the teaching profession, many national education systems face significant problems with teacher supply which, with ageing workforces and increasing teacher retirements in the next two decades, are only likely to worsen (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2022). Though by no means a recent phenomenon, the European Commission has attributed this current teacher crisis to the low attractiveness of the profession and argued that longer-term systematic efforts need to be made to improve recruitment and retention if progress is to be made on targets towards the achievement of a European Education Area (European Commission, 2022).
Comparative research suggests that issues of teacher supply and demand – and the national education policies designed to address them – are highly contextualised (IBF Consulting, 2013a, 2013b). Moreover, despite the critical role that employer and employee organisations might play as social partners in teacher policy development, governance structures – and the division of policy labour between national, local and school-level actors – can inhibit social dialogue and teacher union engagement in industrial and professional issues (Stevenson, et al., 2018). Ultimately though, the relative ‘attractiveness’ of the teaching profession should be considered from a sociological and historical perspective (Cochran Smith, 2006) and in the context of a wider labour market which, in the post-pandemic era, has undergone significant transformation (Stevenson & Milner, 2023). All these interrelated factors suggest a need for empirical research to expand our understanding of this complex problem in order to promote a bargaining agenda based on a systemic and strategic response to the teacher crisis in Europe.
To address the gaps in knowledge and industrial relations in education, this paper explores teacher unions' strategic actions to improve the attractiveness of the teaching profession in three European contexts: Ireland, Poland and Sweden. The principal research questions are:
1. What is the situation in relation to teacher supply in Ireland, Poland and Sweden?
2. What factors explain problems of teacher recruitment and retention in these contexts?
3. How have teacher unions been able to intervene to improve the attractiveness of the teaching profession through effective social dialogue?
Drawing on Archer (2008), we approach this paper through a critical realist lens which understands teacher union involvement in social dialogue processes as both spatially and temporally contingent. For Archer, society is defined by its morphogenic nature; namely, its capacity to change its shape or form. Significant to morphogenesis is the notion of temporality; current social structures – discourses, practices, relations, conventions – are the products of past social actions. Thus, teacher union agents can only transform future social structures through strategic actions conditioned by their present social context and their differential capacities to act on professional and industrial issues. To understand the potential for transformation, it is therefore important to analyse both the structural constraints and agential freedom of organised teachers within their diverse social and cultural contexts. Two significant social conditions for union action in our research were: i) social dialogue processes at the national level and ii) established industrial relations systems and frameworks in the context of wider socio-economic, health and humanitarian crises.
