A few weeks ago, news outlets across the province covered a meeting of the Nova Scotia government’s human resources committee. At issue was the province’s supply of teachers.

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According to Tracey Barbrick, the deputy minister of education, the number of people we have willing to pursue teaching qualifications is “heading in the right direction.”

For his part, Nova Scotia Teachers Union president Peter Day seems to feel that the government is focusing on the wrong part of the issue. To quote Day, “We can’t recruit our way out of a shortage.”

One of the key issues that inspired the meeting of the committee in the first place was a decision a couple of years back by the Tim Houston government to offer new graduates from B.Ed. programs contracts right out of school as a way of dealing with Nova Scotia’s crippling teacher shortage.

Although sounding good on paper, those contracts caused some teachers who were working toward a contract to be overlooked. Teachers who may have been slogging it out in our system for two or three years were understandably put out that brand-new grads were being handed contracts. This would be analogous to newly trained tradespeople being handed their Red Seal over other those who had already been apprenticing.

That’s why Day’s comments on the matter resonate so soundly with me. The major problem with government’s approach to teacher shortages is that they focus mainly on recruitment as opposed to retention. Indeed, I have been criticising that particular ideology for about a decade and have seen little appetite from government to adapt their approach.

Certainly,........

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