Our View: Govt must show no mercy on underperforming teachers

World Teachers Day was marked on Monday just days ahead of planned industrial action by teachers in Cyprus and one day before the unions are to meet Education Minister Athena Michaelidou. Unions have been invited to a last-minute meeting on a revised proposal concerning the appointments system, which aims to head off the measures by unions slated for Thursday. Michaelidou, in a Facebook post, pledged to push ahead with reforms that would “support teachers and improve learning opportunities for children”. Teachers, she said, were the “backbone” of education. The government, the minister added, “acknowledged that the quality of education was linked to support towards teachers”. This might have been more realistically rephrased to reflect common sense – the quality of education is linked to the quality of teachers, not just the amount of money thrown at education. The decades-old appointment list where anyone with a degree sticks their name down and waits for a post is due to be completely scrapped by September 2027, and has been nothing but a massive grift where many enter the profession late in life just to run down the clock to a fat retirement. Just 16 per cent of teachers are aged 25-35, the lowest across the EU. That’s not to say that all teachers are grifters. No doubt there are teachers who genuinely inspire pupils. There are probably overworked teachers on low pay and underworked teachers on high pay. The only way to fix this will be a rigorous evaluations system and no mercy for underperformers if the government has the guts. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned or how much money is spent on curriculums and programmes, if a teacher does not care about doing a good job, the result will be negative. This has been evident for decades, reaffirmed in the latest OECD report last month which said Cyprus continues to spend more on education than most EU countries but records some of Europe’s weakest test results. Education accounted for 13.2 per cent of total public expenditure in 2024, compared with an EU average of 9.7 per cent. Spending amounted to 5 per cent of GDP, or €1.8 billion. It sounds a lot like commitment to education but Cyprus also has the second-highest share of education expenditure allocated to salaries in the EU, behind Belgium. Following publication of the report, Michaelidou twisted herself into a pretzel trying to justify the abysmal results by calling them “overwhelmingly stable” when it clearly showed that things had only worsened since the previous report. We may attribute some of the decline between 2022 and 2025 to the advent of AI because teenagers will be teenagers but the probability that teachers may also be outsourcing their thinking to a machine is also quite high. This likely lessens their workload considerably, not that they would be keen to admit it. Teaching used to be a vocation, which is the notion of service to others above service to self. In Cyprus this concept is inverted, not just in teaching, not all the time and not everywhere but enough to notice. More importantly, the outcomes of this are self-evident.