Introduction
On Friday, 29 November 2021, the Ministry of National Education, Primary Education, and Sports (also “the Ministry of National Education”) announced a new recruitment period for teachers, administration and economics assistants, and social assistants for Morocco’s regional academies. What distinguished this recruitment process from previous ones was the addition of special conditions not previously applied, such as limiting the age of candidates to a maximum of 30 years old, preferencing candidates based on achievements recorded in their baccalaureate and bachelor’s degrees, and prioritizing those who had not previously held a job contract in private sector schools. Despite these criteria angering university students and graduates, the same conditions were applied to the recruitment initiative on 5 October 2024.
These decisions constituted a continuation of the education system’s contracting scheme adopted by the ministry in 2016 as part of a series of decisions intended to reduce both access to public employment and public spending on the education system. The Ministry of National Education saw these policies as a way to attract the best and most prepared teachers, thereby increasing the quality and efficiency of public education. These decisions were also controversial: an ongoing protest movement emerged in 2017, demanding the integration of regional academy staff into public service in accordance with a 2003 statute.
The conflict between those affected by the new recruitment system and the ministry intensified following the government’s approval of the National Education Sector Staff Statute on 6 October 2023. This statute ignored the demand made by the regional academies’ teachers to be integrated into the civil service system and led to a series of strikes and anger in public schools for nearly three months. The protest mobilization led to the amendment and improvement of the Statute of Education and Training Employees, which was approved by the Council of Government on 15 February 2024, notably the introduction of a “public servant” status for regional academy teachers, increasing the value of their civil pensions. The government also amended several decrees that were at issue between opponents of the new statute and the government, including the ministry, especially after dialogues held on 10 December and 26 December 2023.
These decisions, aimed at reforming education through the hiring of new teachers, are part of a political agenda that began in the late 1990s with the National Charter for Education and Training in 1999, one of the outcomes of the 1983 structural adjustment policies that sought to reduce public spending on public sectors such as education. However, reforming and improving education cannot be reduced to simply tightening the prerequisites for employment in the sector and attracting the best teachers; these methods place the responsibility for raising the quality and efficiency of education on teachers.
Since independence, education has been a field of social conflict, characterized by several levels of inequality and social justice: between rural and urban areas; between girls and boys; or between private school graduates with high proficiency in foreign languages and public school graduates, who face difficulties in finding work due to their poor foreign language skills and subsequent difficulties in moving up the social ladder. When combined with public schools’ poor infrastructure and overcrowded classrooms, it is no surprise that the private sector is the more attractive in the field of education, especially given the current context of extreme commodification of education and the erosion of trust in public schools. This paper will discuss the new employment system in Morocco’s educational sector, starting with the origins and history of the decision, followed by an examination of the contract system, moving to the fate of university degree holders under this system, and finally looking at teachers’ job security and satisfaction.
The Decision to Cap Public Education Employment
Since Morocco’s independence, reforming public education and increasing its quality and efficiency have been central to the public policies of the royal institution and successive governments, and vitally important to local authorities, education and training institutions, and partners concerned with education and training such as the private sector, civil society associations, and professional unions. The issue of education reform has had great importance to these entities, as highlighted in various royal speeches and messages since the accession of King Mohammed VI to the throne. Successive governments have also dedicated themselves to implementing programs and strategies aimed at reforming education and raising its quality, especially in light of the poor integration of graduates into the labor market and the emergence of signs of distrust in the public education system. The years around the turn of the century witnessed the adoption of important agendas aimed at reforming Moroccan education, mainly represented in the National Charter for Education and Training issued in 1999.
The adoption of the structural adjustment policy in 1983 was a key moment in reconsidering the education sector and adopting reform policies with recommendations from the World Bank. These reforms mainly consisted of reducing the allocations for education as a percentage of GDP, shifting part of the cost of education to families, increasing the number of teachers’ working hours without raising their wages, and reducing the percentage of teachers’ employment. Thus, the public school crisis and its low standards were linked to the employment of teachers and the state’s financial calculations regarding the wage block and its connection to international financial debts.
The features of this link between teacher employment and education reform – including improving its quality and efficiency and increasing its connection to the political-economic environment – are evident in the first reform agenda after the structural adjustment, namely the 1999 National Charter for Education and Training, prepared by the Royal Commission on Education and Training. The Charter recommended diversifying the teacher workforce and moving toward contractual employment that would be periodically renewable. The Charter also stipulated the need to improve the teachers’ work, including reviewing ongoing training standards, incentives, evaluations, and promotions. The agenda also included plans to improve curricula, programs, textbooks and references, timetables, diversifying types of learning, and guiding students. It also included a linguistic orientation represented in improvements to the teaching and use of Arabic, mastering foreign languages and opening up to Amazigh culture, and expanding the use of new technology for information and communication.
However, evaluation reports of the National Charter for Education and Training from 1999-2009 recognized the Charter’s failure, especially as noted in the “Implementation of the National Charter for Education, Training, and Scientific Research for the period of 2000-2013” report issued by the National Evaluation Commission. This report revealed that Moroccan schools suffer from a deficiency in their effectiveness, as shown in students’ poor language mastery, knowledge, competencies, and values. The public school issue was thus linked to issues of inequality in learning languages and teaching the skills needed to integrate graduates into the labor market, as well as the reproduction of social conditions that impeded upward social mobility. The assessment was that reforms should focus more on these aspects than on financial equations related to the wage block and reducing public expenditures.
In response to this failure, Morocco adopted the 2009 “Emergency Program” to remedy the failures of the Charter. This followed the king’s call at the opening of the October 2007 parliamentary session to:
Develop an urgent plan to consolidate what has been achieved and rectify what has been lost through the optimal implementation of the Charter’s requirements and the adoption of courageous and effective solutions for this vital sector, in consultation and coordination with the representative constitutional institution, the High Council for Education. )
The king confirmed this in his 30 July 2008 throne speech, calling for the program’s activation and dedicated involvement for all affected parties. As stated in the report by the High Council for Education, the Emergency Program focused on promoting primary education and compulsory education; opening space and creating support for private sector institutions providing this public service; adopting regional management of human resources and gradually reducing centralized management; developing the qualifications and competencies of educational actors; establishing contract employment; and reviewing the language policy. The Emergency Program also adopted the pedagogy of inclusion as an option, despite teachers’ lack of familiarity with it. Unfortunately, the Emergency Program continued to hold teachers partly responsible for the failure of the reform agendas, and also continued to not directly address the inequality and injustice produced in Moroccan education. The educational system continued to suffer from the imbalance between education and the economy on the one hand, and school and society on the other, through the continued high rates of unemployment among degree holders and the widening social gap in terms of education and language, thus reinforcing society’s negative attitude toward school despite the efforts of the Charter and the Emergency Program.
After the failure of both the Charter and the Emergency Program to achieve the education reform agenda, the Supreme Council for Education and Training issued the 2015-2030 Strategic Vision for Education Reform. This vision was also prompted by King Mohammed VI in his speech on 20 August 2013, where he presented an assessment of the education sector – stressing its role in political-economic integration and the need to mobilize more resources to achieve these goals – and called for the revival of the High Council for Education (now the High Council for Education and Training) as a permanent and independent institution for monitoring and evaluating public policies related to education.
In these various reform agendas, the teacher has been an essential component for achieving the goals of reform and improvement. Public policies aimed at education in Morocco have also attempted to improve the educational system through several measures, mainly through the adoption of a new system for recruiting teachers, as stipulated in the National Charter for Education and Training, the Strategic Vision 2015-2030, and the Framework Law for Education and Training 51/17. All these policies called for the need to revitalize the sector with younger, quality teachers, with the Framework Law stipulating the recruitment of 200,000 teachers between 2017 and 2030. This order is meant to address the significant shortage of human resources due to the retirement, including early retirement, of a large number of teachers.
From the Public Service System to the Contract System
The decision of the Ministry of National Education, Primary Education, and Sports to adopt the new requirements for hiring teachers was followed by anger and protests in several regions of Morocco, and the suspension of studies in a group of university faculties. The protests were joined by graduates, students, and staff of regional academies, who saw these decisions as a continuation of the ministry’s contracting scheme in the education system adopted in 2016, which they in turn saw as part of the process of limiting access to public employment in the education system. The protesters also saw these decisions as a denial of their right to work, as the education sector was their only path to employment in Morocco.
The debate over the new employment system in education dates back to 2016, when the ministry adopted a system of contractual employment. This system was later transformed, due to the movement of protesters against it and the crisis of teacher dismissals from the sector, into what was eventually called the regular frameworks of the academies system, and later regional recruitment. The aim was to diversify the employment system for education employees and contribute to raising the quality and effectiveness of public education – based on the directives of the Charter issued in 2000 and the Strategic Vision 2015-2030, as well as the Framework Law 17-51. This was also before the academies’ teachers were granted the status of “public employees” following the revision and approval of the Basic Law for Education and Training Employees on 15 February 2024 after waves of anger and three months of strikes affecting public schools. However, the Basic Law for Education and Training Employees did not specify the conditions of entry for new teachers, nor did it provide any provision regarding the age limit for access to employment in public education, as Article 46 stipulates:
The conditions, procedures, and programs for professional matches and professional competency exams, provided for in this decree, shall be determined by a decision of the government authority in charge of national education, to be approved by the government authority in charge of the civil service.
Table 1: Number of jobs created from 2016 to date by year, showing a jump after the 2016 reforms.
| Academic year |
Number of positions |
| 2016 |
11,000 |
| 2017 |
24,000 |
| 2018 |
17,000 |
| 2019 |
15,000 |
| 2020 |
15,000 |
| 2021 |
17,000 |
| 2022 |
15,000 |
| 2023 |
20,000 |
| 2024 |
16,000 |
| Total |
154,000 |
Source: Zaanoun, “Contractual Employment in Education” (edited).
The growth in the number of new positions, especially when compared to the period before 2017, is due to the shrinking number of teachers following large-scale retirements and the acceptance of many relatively early retirement applications; new jobs were not created to balance the scale. The system of recruitment through academies was able to overcome this imbalance without directly affecting the state’s public expenditures, as teachers’ expenses were counted in the equipment budget.
However, there are some obvious oversights in the stated plan and vision. If the authors of the new education employment policy claim that the goal is to improve the quality of public school outputs, this cannot be achieved only through strict conditions for new hires; it also requires improvements to teachers’ environments and working conditions to ensure that the career path can be managed in a way that encourages effort and dedication.
The vision also requires, for lack of a better word, a vision. The first criterion establishes how teachers are recruited, selected, and trained; the second criterion relates to the school structure; and the third creates the evaluation and promotion system. There is a notable absence of a forward-looking vision; instead, the plan led to the hasty recruitment of teachers under the academies’ framework system; this affected the attractiveness of the profession and its image in society, and in turn created tensions between public actors and teachers, as demonstrated by long protests over the rules on recruitment, training, promotion, and wages. Moreover, the choice of a career in education in Morocco is not solely subject to personal preferences or the attractiveness of the profession but rather influenced by insufficient job opportunities for those with basic university degrees in other sectors.
Tightening Hiring Conditions for Teachers: What About Those with University Degrees?
On 5 October 2024, the Ministry of National Education, Primary Education, and Sport held recruitment for teaching and specialized staff; it was well attended by those with advanced degrees in primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary education and management. However, as stated above, this turnout does not necessarily indicate the attractiveness of the teaching profession in Morocco but rather reflects the high unemployment rates among holders of advanced degrees. According to figures from the High Commission for Planning, the unemployment rate among young people with advanced degrees reached 20.03% during the first half of 2024.
The attractiveness of the teaching profession is essential to the process of education reform and quality. It is reflected in professional output, job satisfaction, commitment, patience, quality, and perseverance in practicing the profession. On the other hand, the motivations for entering the teaching profession in Morocco remain linked to external factors, such as having a stable job, fewer hours, and more vacations than other jobs. These motivations are less related to internal factors such as community service and love of the profession. Statistics show that 28.2% of Moroccan families prefer their children to work in the public sector, compared to 26.2% in the private sector, while only 8.8% want their children to pursue a career in education. Finally, those with good scores in their baccalaureate degree prefer to study in high schools with limited polarization; university and the teaching profession remain backup alternatives in case they are not accepted in these schools.
It is clear, then, that a career in education in Morocco is neither attractive to high achievers nor is it the best option for those with basic university degrees. Despite this, the Ministry of Education links the new conditions it has set for the recruitment of academies’ regular staff to quality, restoring Moroccans’ confidence in the education and training sector, and attracting the best candidates to the teaching profession. The ministry wants a bachelor’s degree specifically in education to be a future requirement for new teachers, meaning that the recruitment prerequisites would exclude those with basic university degrees.
It is expected that by 2030, the percentage of regular staff of the regional academies will reach more than 80% of the human resources of the Ministry of Education’s teachers. To this end, the ministry has worked to involve universities in the process of training future teachers by creating degrees in education for primary and secondary education. This scheme has been in place since the start of the 2018-19 academic year, when universities expected to enroll 5,000 students studying education per year. The number of open seats for the 2023-24 academic year jumped to 24,315 seats for access to the first, second, and third years of the bachelor’s degree in education. Universities thus enrolled more than 20,000 bachelor’s degree students in education, instead of 5,000 students as planned, to meet the ministry’s desire to limit the match to graduates of bachelor’s degrees in education.
This scheme raises several issues, such as its ability to address the shortage of teachers in light of its conflict with the Framework Law for Education and Training 17.51, which aims to recruit 200,000 teachers between 2017 and 2030 regardless of whether they have a bachelor’s in education; the Framework Law would indicate a continued need for those with professional or basic university degrees. It also indicates a need to reopen specialized professional degrees in teaching, given that the educational degrees currently available at the university level do not include all specialized subjects in primary or secondary education. It is important to note that mastery of specialized subjects is an essential part of a teacher’s effectiveness and achieving the desired quality in education.
Making a bachelor’s degree in education the only necessary qualification to enter the teaching profession in the future also raises issues on other levels. In addition to the inability of graduates to fill the shortage and the inadequacy of their qualifications for the subjects they are required to teach, there is still a lack of clarity regarding the employment of these graduates after training. It is also worth noting that there are few instructors in educational sciences in universities, which necessarily creates difficulty in increasing the currently limited absorption capacity of these degrees in education. Furthermore, there are no legal guarantees regarding improving the wages of these graduates. All these indicators show the continued absence of a clear strategy for the recruitment of teachers in Morocco.
It is clear from this data that the policy of recruiting teachers is subject to quantitative logic rather than being linked to the challenges of improving Moroccan schooling. The recruitment of teachers is also subject to the fluctuations of the positions created under the annual budget law. Recruitment through regional academies of education and training allows successive governments to directly control certain wages and maintain Morocco’s commitments to the International Monetary Fund, under the credit and liquidity plan, whereby the salaries of regular staff are not counted as part of the personnel expenditure, but are included under equipment expenditure. With the match still organized at the national level, human resources management and planning are centralized by the Directorate of Strategy, Statistics, and Planning.
The decision to cap the age of applicants to the regular framework competition to 30-year-olds would also prevent many people with high qualifications and advanced degrees from entering the teaching profession, including those with a degree in education. While the Ministry of Education believes that this decision is intended to provide an opportunity for teachers to advance in the profession and move to other educational responsibilities instead of spending their service until retirement just teaching, those who reject this decision consider it a retreat from the gains achieved in the public service. But what the government does not realize is that the age cap is nothing more than a technical measure; education reform will not be achieved by hiring young people but by improving working conditions.
Achieving quality in the Moroccan education system will not only come through reforming the system of selecting, recruiting, and training teachers, but it must also include providing a school structure and an evaluation and promotion system that encourages teachers to dedicate themselves, perform well, commit to their role, and take responsibility for their students. It is not enough to ascertain motivation in the entrance exams only; this motivation and passion for teaching must be created through an encouraging school structure and an evaluation and promotion system that encourages creativity and diligence and restores the teacher’s status in society.
The Teaching Profession and Job Security
The crisis of arbitrary dismissal and suspension of teachers from academies’ frameworks without compensation was followed by a protest movement in 2017 that rejected this employment system. The movement argued that the system was creating professional fragility, fear of dismissal, and instability. Despite the issuance of the statute for the regular frameworks of regional academies in 2018 and the new statute for education and training employees in its first version in late 2023, the crisis of dismissing teachers appointed to academies’ frameworks persists. The protests against the new statute were followed by the suspension without pay of many teachers active in organizing the protests, both within the academies’ frameworks and as teachers under the old employment system.
Job satisfaction is an essential component of quality and continuity in educational systems. The performance of teachers is often based on the professional environment in which they work, including their relationships with their colleagues, principals, and students, and their sense of belonging and security. Teachers’ working conditions have a significant impact on their motivation. In the case of academy teachers, we find, for example, that managers exert pressure and authority over this group when it comes to the number of working hours, assigning the most difficult sections, imposing educational frameworks, and mandating tasks to be done alone. The new recruitment policy has also trivialized the teaching profession and created a sense of insecurity and inferiority in relation to their colleagues. This negative image of academy staff is not limited to the school environment in which they work, but extends to the rest of society as well.
This anxious and precarious situation has led many teachers to view teaching as a transitional phase while they wait for a better job. Moreover, teachers suffer from uncertainty about their future, due to the uncertainty of their statutory and administrative status. Resigning from a position in order to reenter recruitment is often rejected; when it is accepted, it is accompanied by difficulties. For example, academies do not grant licenses to their staff to pass university recruitment exams for those who have a doctoral degree.
The new statute of 2024 took note of this issue and tried to improve it through steps such as increasing wages, seeking to achieve wage justice among all categories of the national education sector, stipulating that all teaching staff belong to the public service, and opening a competition within the Ministry of National Education for research professors with a doctoral degree to advance to the rank of research professor. However, the statute itself left the conditions for entry into the teaching profession up to the governmental authority.
Conclusion
This paper analyzed the rationality of the decision to tighten the new employment requirements in the public education sector in Morocco, which constituted a continuation of the contracting scheme adopted in 2016, as well as the contribution of this decision to the reform efforts. The paper concludes that tightening the conditions of employment alone is not enough to reform Moroccan education. This decision is no more than a technical measure to reduce public spending on the public education sector and is subject to the state’s financial calculations regarding the wage block and its connection to international financial debt. The government sees it as a rational decision aimed at improving and reforming Moroccan education by attracting the best and most motivated teachers to the profession, rejuvenating the sector, diversifying teachers, and overcoming the teacher shortage caused by early retirement campaigns. Instead, this decision resulted in protests that pointed out the restrictions on the right of access to public employment in the education sector, especially for holders of basic university degrees over the age of 30.
The quality of education systems around the world is measured not only by tightening the conditions for selecting and hiring teachers – in terms of age and having a bachelor’s degree in education instead of a basic university degree – but also by improving the promotion and evaluation system, school infrastructure, working conditions, job security, and job satisfaction. Public policies directed at the education sector in Morocco are characterized by improvisation and uncertainty regarding who is eligible to enter the profession, expected salaries, the promotion and evaluation system, and a lack of predictability and foresight in terms of addressing the staffing shortage, the availability of education professionals, and the capacity of universities and teachers’ schools to train new teachers. For example, the relative retirement crisis has resulted in the hiring of teachers on a contractual basis, and, in some seasons, it has meant insufficient time to train new teachers.
Moreover, the teaching profession has lost the appeal it once had, especially after the imposition of the contract system. Thus, the narrative that the new entry requirements are intended to attract the best and youngest teachers seems to be futile, especially since top baccalaureate holders prefer to study at exclusive tertiary institutions with limited enrollment rather than at universities and teacher-training schools. If the turnout for the teaching entrance exam is high, this is a result of the high unemployment rates among young people with degrees, as well as the job stability offered by working in the public sector, and the teaching sector in particular, which offers fewer hours and more vacations.
The adoption of the new employment policy is in itself an application of advanced regionalization, but the education game, its planning, and management are still formulated at a centralized level. The field of education in Morocco is difficult to reform by attracting only the best teachers, especially since it is a field of social conflict characterized by several levels of inequality. This hinders graduates from achieving social mobility, especially in light of the commodification of the sector and the proliferation of private schools and their graduates. Because of all this, the research argues that public policies should focus more on fixing inequalities than on tightening employment conditions.
The views represented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Arab Reform Initiative, its staff, or its board.
