Germany's refugee teachers

Five years on from the refugee crisis of 2015, Germany is now home to over a million refugees. In Germany’s Refugee Teachers, Naomi Scherbel-Ball explores a classroom experiment with a difference, a scheme to retrain refugee teachers and place them in German schools to help the country with a shortage of 40,000 teachers.

Naomi visits a school in Mönchengladbach in Western Germany, where Mustafa Hammal teaches English. Mustafa, an English teacher with eight years of experience, fled the civil war in Syria with his family in 2015. Arriving in Germany, he discovered a teacher retraining programme designed to harness the skills that refugee teachers bring with them.

Miriam Vock, an educational psychologist at Potsdam University transports us back to the summer of 2015. Amidst the chaos of the refugee crisis, she wondered if there might be some teachers amongst the refugees arriving in Germany. A year later the first refugee teacher retraining course was launched, an idea that inspired a number of other pilot courses across Germany.

Retraining as a teacher in a system with rigid set qualifications, is particularly challenging however and graduates are finding it difficult to find work. The success of the far-right Alternative for Germany, now the country’s main opposition party, has raised the stakes for refugees trying to integrate.

As Germany struggles with an ageing population and a severe labour shortage, Naomi asks if refugees can fill the gap?