Old and new segmentations: The case of the teaching profession in French-speaking Belgium

This chapter focuses on the construction and development of the teaching profession in French-speaking Belgium. Using a socio-historical approach, it first shows how educational provision – from the very origin of the Belgian state, in the context of a consociational democracy – differentiated between public education and Catholic education, resulting in differences in the employment conditions of teachers, their initial training and their remuneration that persisted until the mid-20th century. Consolidation of an integrated educational system – covering primary and secondary education, general and vocational training – eventually ensued in the emergence of teaching as a professional group, more integrated, but even then, traces of the original forms of segmentation remained. Since 1989, education in Belgium has been supported by the three language communities resulting in three parallel education systems. In this context, important developments have taken place in French-speaking Belgium, which confirmed desegmentation trends observed previously, with the reinforcement of both the education system and the labour market for teachers regulation, while new forms of segmentation emerged, in part linked to this tighter regulation of the teachers’ work and the teaching profession.

Affiliations

UCLouvainSSH/IACS - Institute of Analysis of Change in Contemporary and Historical Societies

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Cattonar, B., Dumay, X., & Dupriez, V. (2023). Old and new segmentations: The case of the teaching profession in French-speaking Belgium. In Dumay, Xavier & Burn, Katharine (ed.), The Status of the Teaching Profession (p. p. 62-79). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003042563-4