Regulation 274: Barrier or Opportunity for Newly Certified Ontario Teachers?

Newly certified teachers in the province of Ontario, Canada encounter a series of hurdles imposed by Regulation 274 before they qualify for full-time employment in the profession. Provincial Faculties of Education and US border colleges, which were certifying Ontario teachers, graduated an unprecedented number of newly certified teachers. Between the years 2006 - 2015, the annual surplus of newly certified teachers in the province reached 7,800. Faced with the results of heavy over-certification and underemployment of teachers brought on in large part by lax government control and seemingly unrestricted access to teacher education programmes, the provincial government initiated an ill-conceived reaction and introduced legislation, known as Regulation 274, to staunch the flow of newly certified teachers. In addition to Regulation 274, the government launched a plan-of-action that resulted in changing the one-year teacher education program to a two-year program while cutting the number of seats available within Faculties of Education to one-half post 2015 numbers. Regulation 274, characterized at the time by the Premier, as an “over-correction”, required newly certified teachers, beginning in 2015, to be subject to policies and standards that restricted their immediate entry into the rank and file of classroom teachers. While the trend in supply and demand has favoured employment opportunities for Ontario teachers since 2016, Regulation 274 is still in effect. Given the restrictions of 274 and the added expense of another year of specialized education, this study sought to identify the job-seeking behaviours and plans, in the current employment climate of the province of the first cohort of graduates from the two-year program in a northern Ontario university, exiting in 2017. Employment prospects and other social factors were found to influence employment decisions of these new teachers