School strategy and teacher shortages in the Netherlands; do short-staffed schools differ from other schools?

School strategy and teacher

shortages in the Netherlands; do

short-staffed schools differ from

other schools?

08-06-2020

Leiden University

Public Administration (Msc) – Public Management and Leadership

Author:

Roman van der Lee – S1793241

Supervisor:

Dr. P.E.A. van den Bekerom

First reader:

Dr. P.E.A. van den Bekerom

Second reader:

Dr. J.E.T. Schmidt

Table of contents

ABSTRACT __________________________________________________________________________________ 3 INTRODUCTION _____________________________________________________________________________ 4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ___________________________________________________________________ 7 METHODOLOGY ____________________________________________________________________________ 19 FINDINGS _________________________________________________________________________________ 33 DISCUSSION _______________________________________________________________________________ 44 CONCLUSION ______________________________________________________________________________ 48 REFERENCES _______________________________________________________________________________ 50 APPENDIX 1: INITIAL CODEBOOK ______________________________________________________________ 55 APPENDIX 2: FINAL CODEBOOK & EXPLANATION _________________________________________________ 56

Abstract

This study examined if and why schools which experience a teacher shortage intend to use a different organizational strategy than public schools which don’t experience a teacher shortage. Drawing on important literature about the strategy use of public organization, schools which experience a teacher shortage were expected to intend to use a prospecting strategy because they would perceive their environment as uncertain while schools which do not experience a teacher shortage were expected to intend to use a defending strategy because they would perceive their environment as stable. These expectations were studied by analysing the school plans of 10 primary schools in the Netherlands. The results of this research show that the opposite of the expectations might be true. With these results, this study contributes to existing literature about strategy use of public organizations because it offers an important indication that public schools might not align their organizational strategy with the organizational environment while important literature would predict otherwise. Instead, other factors might determine the strategy use of public schools/organizations. Further research should focus on studying what these factors might be during different environmental circumstances. Uncovering these factors and adding them to commonly used strategy models will enable researchers to predict the strategy use of public organizations more accurately. Practically, the evidence from this study implies that public schools might benefit from critically assessing whether their organizational strategy is congruent with the organizational environment.

Introduction

Overcrowded classrooms, unqualified staff in front of classrooms and sending students home because nobody is available to teach them. For primary schools in urban areas in the Netherlands, these situations are not exceptional anymore (Poortvliet, 2018; Koops, 2017). A national shortage of primary schoolteachers has been an important and increasing societal problem in the Netherlands for a few years now (De Kort, 2019). Primary schools which experience a teacher shortage can become unable to fully supply the public service that they offer because they simply lack the personnel to do so. Thus, the national teacher shortage could create an impossible situation for schools which are affected by this shortage. How does the management of an affected school respond to this situation? Do they undertake certain strategic activities that unaffected schools don’t? In other words, do schools which cope with a teacher shortage use a different organizational strategy than schools which don’t cope with such a shortage?

The above mentioned shortage can be an important part of a school’s organizational environment which consists of all the things/people inside and outside the organization (Ewusi-Mensah, 1981). The teacher shortage within this environment is a form of environmental turbulence (O’Toole & Meier, 2003) since turbulence is defined as irregular changes within organizational environments (Van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, & Akkerman, 2016). Previous scientific studies have shown that the management of a public organization highly matters for minimizing the negative effects of turbulence on organizational performance (Meier & O’Toole, 2009; Boyne & Meier, 2009; Fischer, 2012; Haleblian & Finkelstein, 1993). Specifically for primary schools, it was shown that activities aimed at coordinating people and/or resources within an organization (internally oriented networking activities) attenuated the negative effects of a declining number of students. However, this was not the case for externally oriented networking activities which aim to reduce the impact of the environment by using new opportunities or compensating for a reduction of resources (Van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, & Akkerman, 2016). These internally and externally oriented networking activities are examples of strategic activities that are part of the strategy of an organization. A strategy can be defined as ‘an explicit plan, developed consciously and purposefully, and made in advance of the specific decisions to which it applies’ (Mintzberg, 1978, p. 935). Such a plan can be qualified as an organizational strategy when the organizational activities are coherently executing the same plan (Mantere, 2013). Since the above mentioned strategic activities matter for performance and are also part of the organizational strategy, it can be concluded that the

content of the organizational strategy of a school matters for the school’s performance. An empirical test of whether the organizational strategy of a public organization mattered for performance corroborated that this is the case (Andrews, Boyne & Walker, 2006).

The proposition that strategy matters for performance has always been present within scientific research (Andrews, Boyne & Walker, 2006). Miles and Snow (1978) even hypothesized that one kind of strategy will work better during some circumstances while another may work better during different circumstances. They identified different types of interaction between an organization and its environment. Miles and Snow (1978) used these different ways of interaction to formulate a typology consisting of 4 different organizational strategies that could be used to classify a strategy of an organization. A first strategy is prospecting which entails having a proactive orientation towards the organizational environment by constantly looking for opportunities or threats within the environment. Defending is a second strategy that aims to buffer the environment while focussing on the internal organization. The third strategy is analysing which is a mix of the prospecting and the defending strategy. Reacting is the fourth strategy which entails not interacting with the environment until the environment forces the organization to do so. According to Miles and Snow (1978), the characteristics of the organizational environment like stability determine which strategy would be most effective for an organization. Furthermore, they stated that the better an organizational strategy would fit with the environment of an organization, the better an organization would perform. This typology has been extensively studied and tested, thereby often not including the analysing strategy because this strategy is seen as a mix between different strategies and the model already assumes that organizations often use a mix of strategies (Boyne & Walker, 2004). Over the years, multiple studies have concluded that the alignment of the organizational strategy with the organizational environment does in fact determine some part of organizational performance, although scholars do not agree yet which strategy works best during possible different circumstances (Meier et al., 2010; Walker et al., 2010).

Thus, the kind of strategy that the management of a public school uses will affect the performance of the school. Moreover, some strategies could impact the performance more positively than others depending on the environment of the school (Meier et al., 2010). For example, a school could use a defending strategy during a time with much turbulence within the environment to maintain the quality of their service. Therefore, comparing the strategies of public schools which cope with a teacher shortage (that is caused by environmental turbulence) with the strategies of schools which don’t experience this shortage may provide valued

scientific knowledge about the behaviour of public organizations during a very difficult situation in which the organization may not be able to fully supply the demand of their service. This research will make that comparison by studying the following research question:

- Do public schools which experience a teacher shortage use a different organizational strategy than public schools which don’t experience a teacher shortage and how could this be explained?

By making this comparison, this study aims to contribute to the current scientific knowledge about the relationship between organizational strategies of public organizations and their environment. The context of a teacher shortage at public schools makes this study unique as the relationship between this contextual factor and organizational strategies has not been studied before. Yet, this context is highly relevant because teacher shortages are present worldwide which affects the performance of a lot of schools (Garcia & Weiss, 2019; Dolton & Newson, 2003). Therefore, knowledge about strategy use of schools during short-staffed times could benefit a large amount of organizations. Since the teacher shortage in the Netherlands will be studied and this national shortage seems far from resolved (De Kort, 2019), specifically Dutch schools might benefit from this study because studying the above stated research question could provide the management of public schools in the Netherlands with practical knowledge about how other schools act and how this could be explained. The management of a school might use this new knowledge to adjust their own organizational strategy to increase its alignment with the school’s environment thereby possibly increasing performance.

An important preliminary remark to this study is that there is an important difference between the strategy that an organization intends to execute and the strategy that the organization is actually executing (Mintzberg, 1978; Boyne and Walker, 2004). The realized organizational strategy formed the initial focus of this research because this strategy displays what managers actually do, which is practically more valuable and applicable than what managers/organizations intend to do. However, this focus requires the use of interviews as a data gathering method and the COVID-19 crisis has made this method impossible due to practical issues. Consequently, the focus of this research shifted towards the intended organizational strategy which could be studied by doing a strategy analysis of publicly available school plans (Boyne & Walker, 2004).

Theoretical framework

In this chapter, literature that is considered relevant for answering the research question will be discussed. First of all, the organizational environment and the concept of turbulence will be elaborated. Next, organizational strategies and the different strategy typologies that exist will be discussed. Lastly, the literature about strategy will be applied to the specific case of the personnel/teacher shortage in the Netherlands which will result in two hypotheses that close this chapter.

Environmental turbulence

‘The organizational environment may be considered as consisting of all variables - people and things (e.g. laws and regulations) - external to the organization but capable of producing or causing conditions which can either favourably or adversely affect the state of the organization and its future’ (Ewusi-Mensah, 1981, p. 302). Undoubtedly, almost every organizational in the world will at some point experience a difficult change in their organizational environment. This is often referred to as environmental turbulence. Ansell (2017, p.77) defines this turbulence as ‘situations where demands interact in a highly variable, inconsistent, unexpected, and/or unpredictable manner’. However, turbulence does not only affect the demands but might also affect the amount of resources that are available for an organization to produce their goods/services (Boyne & Meier, 2009). ‘Irregular changes in the organization’s environment’ is a broader definition of organizational turbulence that fully captures not only the increasing demands or decreasing resources but all changes in the environment (Van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, & Akkerman, 2016, p. 640). The growing national shortage of teachers in the Netherlands is such an irregular change within the environment of schools. Therefore, the teacher shortage could be qualified as a form of environmental turbulence (O’Toole & Meier, 2003). Studies have shown that environmental turbulence can negatively impact the performance of a public or private organization because changes in the environment, for example budget cuts, will decrease the stability of an organization which causes the organization to perform worse (Ansell, 2017; Boyne & Meier, 2009). As leaders of organizations, the management tries to reduce the negative impact of environmental turbulence on the organizational performance. This activity can even be designated as one of the most important tasks that a manager has because the management of an organization is responsible for the performance of an organization (Meier & O’Toole, 2009). A wide body of research

shows that managers are in fact able to reduce these negative effects in multiple ways. Meier and O’Toole (2009) showed that decisions about internal resource allocation and personnel management could protect the production of an organization during environmental turbulence. Boyne and Meier (2009) showed that maintaining internal stability by maintaining the current organizational structure and sticking with the same strategy could also reduce the negative effects of turbulence because this ensures that the staff of an organization clearly knows what is expected of them and how they should act. Activities aimed at coordinating people and/or resources within an organization (internally oriented networking activities) also proved to be a way to attenuate negative consequences of environmental changes, while this turned out not the case for externally oriented networking activities aimed at reducing the impact of the environment by using new opportunities or compensating for a reduction of resources (Van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, & Akkerman, 2016). Even being less dominant as a CEO by creating a work environment in which employees feel free to share their ideas could improve performance in turbulent environments, because this causes an increased flow of information that could be useful during turbulent times (Haleblian & Finkelstein, 1993). Thus, it can be concluded that the management of an organization can do various things to reduce the negative effects of turbulence. It is therefore likely that the management of an organization has some kind of strategy of the various things that the organization or the management will do to reduce the effects of turbulence. This is often referred to as the organizational strategy.

Organizational strategy

Although many people will probably have a clear mental picture about what the concept organizational strategy entails, Mintzberg (1978) rightly states that this term can refer to many different forms of strategy. The simplest explanation of strategy is simply a plan. This definition would qualify every statement about what someone/something is going to do as a strategy. A more specific and measurable definition of strategy is ‘an explicit plan, developed consciously and purposefully, and made in advance of the specific decisions to which it applies’ (Mintzberg, 1978, p. 935). This definition adds a few conditions to qualifying a plan as a strategy which narrows down the range of plans that could be called a strategy. Such a strategy can be qualified as an organizational strategy when the organizational activities are coherently executing the same plan (Mantere, 2013). This addition to the definition further specifies what qualifies as an organizational strategy which increases the measurability of this concept. Yet, according to

organizational strategy because a formulated organizational strategy may differ from what is actually executed by the organization. Thus, there is an important distinction between the intended strategy (which is defined above) and the realized strategy. The latter is defined by Mintzberg (1978, p. 935) as ‘a pattern in a stream of decisions’. Thus, the realized organizational strategy can be defined as a pattern in a stream of coherent decisions of an organization focused on executing the same plan (Mantere, 2013). The difference between the intended strategy and the realized strategy has large implications for the methodology of studies that are focused on strategy because an intended strategy can be researched by studying written documents that were made before executing a strategy while a realized strategy can be researched by studying what activities managers actually undertake (Boyne and Walker, 2004). As mentioned before, this study aimed at learning more about the actual strategic behaviour of a certain type of public manager (school principals) using interviews as a suitable methodology to study the realized strategy. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 crisis has made this methodology temporarily impossible due to practical issues. Thus, this research has shifted its focus to the intended strategy by studying school documents that were made before executing a strategy. Therefore, the definition of the intended strategy will be referred to when the concept of organizational strategy is mentioned. Nevertheless, it is vital to understand that the intended strategy is being researched in this study and that this intended strategy may differ from what is actually being done by the management of a school (which is the realized strategy).

Classifying organizational strategies

Most organizations in the world will have a plan that contains what the organization aims to achieve and how these goals will be achieved. In other words, most organizations will have an organizational strategy (Mantere, 2013). Each of these plans will differ from plans of other organizations in at least a few ways since no organization is exactly the same. Therefore, countless different organizational strategies exist. In order to be able to learn from these differences by comparing the different organizational strategies, classifying the different types of organizational strategies could be helpful. The reason for this is that a typology will enable a researcher to divide the different organizational strategies into categories to compare all different variables surrounding organizational strategy type A and type B. For example, the difference in performance outcome (as a variable) of strategy type A and B can be compared. It is therefore not unexpected that multiple different typologies exist for the public and private sector. The two most dominant typologies, mainly intended and used for studying the private

sector, are the typology of Porter (1980) and the typology of Miles and Snow (1978; Boyne & Walker, 2004).

The typology of Porter (1980) entails three strategies that companies can use to become successful. A first type of strategy is the organization as a cost leader. Companies that use this strategy will sell their product for a lower price than the competition will do. A second strategy, differentiation, is not focused on the price of a product but more on the product itself. This strategy entails producing a product that is different from all other products to create something unique that a customer wants to buy. The third strategy is focus. Organizations that use this strategy are actually using the strategy differentiation or cost leadership in a very narrow market to gain a competitive advantage. According to Porter (1980), organizations that don’t use one of the three strategies will not perform well. Products, markets and prices are the most important elements that differentiate the types of strategies. Competition between organizations is central to this typology because competition is designated as the main reason for needing a strategy. The other well-known typology of organizational strategies is the typology of Miles and Snow (1978). According to them, organizations can interact with their environment in a few different ways. They state that an organizations performs best when the type of interaction that an organizations uses is in line with the characteristics of the environment. For example, an organization in a fast changing environment should interact with this environment in a way that ensures that the organization keeps track of the rapid changes. The Miles and Snow model (1978) identifies four different strategies for interacting with the environment; prospecting, defending, reacting and analysing. Organizations which use the strategy prospecting are constantly looking for opportunities for their company. Therefore, they will often be the first ones to innovate. Next to that, organization with a proactive strategy will often scan the external environment of the organization for threats and opportunities. A second type of strategy is defending. If an organizations uses this strategy, it will focus on the internal organization. This means that organizations will try to reach their set goals by changing things within the organization as opposed to using resources from the environment to reach their goals. Buffering the environment is what organizations will also aim to achieve when using this strategy. This strategy also entails waiting for innovations to be tested before implementing any change. A third type of strategy is analysing. This strategy contains a mix of the strategies prospecting and defending. Thus, organizations which use this strategy will try to defend their organization by changing the internal organization while simultaneously watching the environment for threats and opportunities. These organizations will not be the first to innovate but will be quick to

implement innovations when their positive effect is proven. The last type of strategy is reacting. Organizations which use this type of strategy will only act if the environment or external actors pushes them to act. Before this push, this organization might not have a clear coherent strategy at all. Thus, these organizations have a so called wait and see attitude.

As mentioned earlier, the most important elements of Porter’s model (1980) are products, markets and prices while competition is designated as the main reason for needing a strategy. The model of Miles and Snow (1978) differs from this model because it classifies the different types of strategies on how the organization chooses to interact with its environment. In the case of the national teacher shortage, the interaction with the environment is highly relevant because the teacher shortage is a condition within the environment of an organization that influences the organization. Therefore, classifying the organizational strategies of schools by the way they interact with the environment is a good fit with this study because the most important condition of the teacher shortage is a factor within the organizational environment. Nevertheless, competition, the main element from Porter’s model (1980), is also very relevant for this study because competition between Dutch primary schools has been severely present since parents gained free choice of schools for their child(ren) (Dronkers, 1995; Noailly, Vujić & Aouragh, 2012). However, classifying the strategies of schools on the way they compete with each other is far less suitable because schools can only differentiate their product to a limited extent, for example by being a religious school or by increasing quality (Noailly, Vujić & Aouragh, 2012). Next to that, public schools are unable to influence the price of education since this is regulated by the federal government in the Netherlands. Thus, the model of Porter (1980) cannot be applied to the case of this study because the most important elements for classifying different strategies cannot be distinguished. Since the model of Miles and Snow (1978) is very relevant and applicable to the case, this model will be used in this research to classify the strategies of the selected schools.

An important notion to the Miles and Snow (1978) model is that an organization almost never uses just one strategy (Boyne & Walker, 2004; Walker et al., 2010; Walker, 2013). Usually, an organization uses a mix of different strategies. This statement contradicts the model itself because the analysing type of strategy is essentially already a mix between two different strategies (Walker & Ruekert, 1987). Following the logic of Walker and Ruekert (1987), the analysing type of strategy will not be included in this research since it is implicitly included by the possibility of mixing different strategies. Another issue of the Miles and Snow model (1978) is that it was designed for the private sector. Since the private sector and public sector differ in

a number of important ways, for example because private organizations can choose their own markets while public organizations cannot do that, Boyne and Walker (2004) saw a need to adapt this model in order to make it applicable for studying the public sector. They referred to the different types of strategies as strategic stances and use the strategies of the Miles and Snow model (1978) as the basis for their model (also excluding the analysing strategy). This concept of strategic stances and the concept organizational strategies will be used as synonyms in this research.

Strategic stances and strategic action

In line with the original model, Boyne and Walker (2004) identify prospectors as organizations which will always look at the environment for trends that could produce threats or opportunities. This externally oriented strategic stance will enable organizations to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment because they regularly experiment with responses to different threats that might arise in the environment (Walker et al., 2010). Organizations with this strategic stance will thus also be one of the first organizations to innovate. In the public sector, organizations with this strategy will seek to increase their budget, innovate within their budget or try to ‘invade the policy space of another organization’ (Boyne & Walker, 2004, p. 240). In conclusion, organizations which use this strategy are really proactive with an orientation toward the external environmental. Applying this to public schools, taking a prospecting strategic stance could mean cooperating with other schools, experimenting/innovation with the way things are done (like teaching and recruiting) or try to increase the budget/teachers’ salary by lobbying/pressuring the people in charge of this.

The second type of strategic stance is defending. As defined by Miles and Snow (1978), this type of strategy is focused on the internal organization. The internal organization will be used to achieve the set organizational goals instead of exploiting the environment for resources and opportunities. Defenders will even try to buffer the environment as much as possible and will instead focus on their core business (Walker et al., 2010). For the public sector, this entails trying to defend the budget and position of the organization within the public sector (Boyne & Walker, 2004). Not surprisingly, these organizations have no desire to be a leader within its sector by innovating. Instead, these organizations will wait for innovations to be tested before implementing any change. For public schools as organizations, schools which use a defending strategic stance arelikely to change things inside the school like the work scheme of teachers

or the amount of pupils in one class to achieve the organizational goals like the goal of increasing the performance of students.

The last type of strategy/strategic stance is reacting. This type of strategy is essentially a lack of a (coherent) strategy (Miles & Snow, 1978) and might also be a complete absence of strategy (Walker, 2013). Organizations with this strategic stance will only act when environmental pressures forces them to (Boyne & Walker, 2004). For organizations within the public sector, this would mean being pushed by external actors like regulators to take action. A wait and see attitude symbolizes this type of strategic stance. For public schools, such a strategy would mean the same as it would for other organizations; not having a clear coherent vison or plan at all. Next to the three different type of strategic stances, Boyne and Walker (2004) also use strategic action in their model to analyse the strategy of public organizations. They define strategic action as decisions to emphasize quality or price and decisions to aim for a narrow or wide market. These decisions could be used to operationalize the different possible strategic stances. The three strategies as defined in the model of Porter (1980) form the basis of the different types of strategic action. Boyne and Walker (2004) adapt this model by replacing the concept products with services and prices with revenues to make the model more applicable to the public sector. They also extend the model by including action categories about changing the internal organization or the external organization. The strategic stances combined with the strategic action forms the complete model of Boyne and Walker (2004) that could be used to classify the different strategies or public organizations. However, the following statement of Boyne and Walker (2004, p. 241) is crucial when researchers intend to apply their model:

‘The use of the term strategic action is intended to emphasize that strategy content refers to how organizations actually behave, in contrast to strategies that are merely rhetorical or intended but unrealized. This in turn implies that strategy content cannot be measured simply by reading organizational mission statements or paper plans. Although such sources can be a useful starting point for building a picture of strategy content, they need to be supplemented by the views of managers (preferably at various organizational levels) about strategy in practice.’

As previously discussed, this research aimed to focus on the actual strategy of organizations by analysing the behaviour of managers. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 crisis has made that goal impossible thereby shifting the focus to the intended strategy. As Boyne and Walker (2004) clearly state, strategic action is about the strategy that is actually being used. Thus, the concept

strategic action will not be part of the analysation in this research. Consequently, the model of Miles and Snow (1978) as adapted by Boyne and Walker (2004) to the strategic stance model will be used as the main typology to classify the different organizational strategies of public schools in the Netherlands.

Strategic stances in different environments

The question at hand is whether public schools which cope with a teacher shortage choose a different strategic stance than schools which don’t cope with this shortage. Understanding in which situation a public manager uses a certain type of strategic stance will help to hypothesize an answer to that question.

The first strategic stance, prospecting, was believed by Miles and Snow (1978) to be a good fit for organizations in a dynamic environment with a lot of turbulence. As stated earlier, environmental turbulence decreases the stability of an organization which could negatively impact performance (Ansell, 2017; Boyne & Meier, 2009). Thus, an organization needs to explore opportunities to protect itself from the turbulence in the environment. An innovative proactive organizational strategy, i.e. a prospecting strategy, does exactly that. In short; the prospecting strategy keeps the organization flexible so it can adjust to the fast changing environment.

The second type of strategy, defending, was expected to be most successful in a stable environment (Miles & Snow, 1978). The reason for this is that organizations which gained certain portion of the total market could consequently protect that portion from being taken by other organizations by stabilizing the organization and protecting it from the environment by using a defensive strategy. In a stable environment, prospectors that try to take a larger portion of the market, or in the public sector the budget, could still be present which requires defenders to protect their share (Boyne & Walker, 2004).

The last type of strategy is reacting. This is a unique strategy because it is considered as never being the best fit for a certain type of environment (Miles & Snow, 1978). Rather, it is a strategy that results from poorly executing one of the other strategies. It can also be the case that an organization fails to formulate a strategy at all (Walker, 2013). Organizations which use this type of strategy will therefore only act when pressured by external actors in the environment (Boyne & Walker, 2004).

As mentioned before, an organization almost never solely relies on one strategy but often uses a mix of the different types of strategies (Miles & Snow, 1978; Boyne & Walker, 2004). Parnell and Hershey (2005) empirically studied that statement by researching the presence of combined organizational strategies and their effects. They found that organizations do in fact combine strategies. For example, a proactive organization can behave like a prospector by developing a new unique product. At the same time, this organization can focus on increasing the efficiency of the internal production process of that new product which is behaviour that is commonly associated with a defending strategy (Miles & Snow, 1978). This shows that organizations can combine strategies simultaneously to increase their performance.

An example of how this model could be used to research strategy behaviour in a certain environment is the study of Schmidt and Van de Walle (2019). In their study, Schmidt and Van de Walle (2019) researched whether, how and why public managers of prisons in the Netherlands interacted with the environment of the organization during times of environmental turbulence in the form of cutbacks. The Miles and Snow model (1978) with the adaptions of Boyne and Walker (2004) was combined with literature about cutbacks to classify what kind of strategy the managers used and why. In line with this model, Schmidt and Van de Walle (2019) expected managers of prisons to use a prospecting strategy since this strategy is believed to produce the best performance results in turbulent environments because this strategy enables the organization to quickly adapt to the changing environment. The strategic stance defending on the other hand is believed to work best in stable environments. Thus, it could be expected that prison managers do not use this strategy during turbulent times of cutbacks. However, the study argued that the specific condition of cutbacks creates a conservative organizational climate with an internal focus and a focus on competition with other organizations instead of trying to innovate. These characterises are more in line with a defending strategy than a prospecting strategy and therefore the study expected to find the use of a defending strategy by prison directors as well as a prospecting strategy. The interesting findings of this study indicate that managers might indeed use other strategies than the prospecting strategy in a turbulent environment. Aside from the characteristics of the environment, the choice of strategy was found to be dependent on the position of a manager within the organization, the perception of the environment by this manager and his/her specific goals.

Unfortunately, the important factors that might determine strategy use beside the environmental characteristics as found by Schmidt and Van de Walle (2019) cannot be studied by this research because the limited scope of this study does not allow for a deep examination of these factors.

Next to that, researching these factors would require a different more in-depth methodology than used for this research. Nevertheless, the notion that strategy use might not be dependent on the environment alone is crucial for interpreting results that might not be fully congruent with the expectations about strategy during certain environmental circumstances.

The environment of schools in the Netherlands

Coming back to the fact that the type of strategy which an organization uses is believed to be largely dependent on the characteristics of the organizational environment (Boyne & Walker, 2004), the environment of schools in the Netherlands is of crucial importance. The most important element of the educational sector in the Netherlands is that it is almost completely funded by the national government while at the same time schools are given a high degree of freedom about how they choose to educate their students (Karsten & Meijer, 1999). However, the degree of control that the Dutch authority exercises on schools can be considered relatively high because the educational inspection strictly monitors the quality of education at each school (Ritzen, Van Dommelen & De Vijlder, 1997; Ehren, Perryman, & Shackleton, 2015). The reason for this is that the Dutch government strives to provide a good quality of education to all children in the Netherlands. Moreover, only a few private primary schools exist in the Netherlands that don’t rely on public funding (Van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, & Akkerman, 2016). Nevertheless, competition between primary schools is severely present because parents have a free choice about to which school they send their child(ren) (Dronkers, 1995; Noailly, Vujić & Aouragh, 2012).

Shocks that can occur within this educational sector are for example increasing rules and regulations, budget cuts, lawsuits, political turbulence, changes in number of pupils and changes in the number of available personnel (Meier & O’Toole, 2009). These forms of environmental turbulence are important because they can negatively impact the performance of schools. Changes in number of pupils for example was found to negatively impact performance (Van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, & Akkerman, 2016).

Personnel stability

The focus of this research is on turbulence of personnel stability. It is important to recognize that this kind of stability matters for public organizations. If this would not be true, organizations would have no reason to include personnel stability as a factor in the decision making process of their organizational strategy. Consequently, this would mean that a relation between a teacher shortage and their strategic stance is non-existent. According to O'Toole and Meier (2003), the stability of personnel (the consistency of employees over time) within a public organization highly matters for the performance of an organization. They reached this conclusions by researching the impact of stability of teachers and school managers on the performance of students. The results show that both forms of stability positively contribute to organizational performance. Personnel stability even turned out to be the most important predictor for school performance in a model that controlled for several variables like class size and teacher salary. With their study, O’Toole and Meier (2003) go against the modern views about the importance of flexibility within public organizations. They state that their results show that stability within organizations is even more important for performance. Although personnel stability relates to the flow of personnel and is thus not necessarily the same as a personnel shortage (which relates to a situation of having insufficient personnel), this study offers an important indication that a personnel shortage could heavily impact organizational performance since a shortage can be considered as an insufficient flow of personnel. Thus, an organization could possibly increase performance by including the level of personnel stability in determining which activities will be part of the organizational strategy.

Perceived environmental stability

According to Miles and Snow (1978), the organization should adapt a strategy that is aligned with the environment and thus the environmental stability/uncertainty. Freel (2005) corroborates that statement while emphasizing that the management of an organization will not choose a strategy on the actual stability of the organizational environment, but rather on the environmental uncertainty that the management perceives. It might thus be the case that the environment is stable but is perceived by a manager as unstable which causes him/her to choose a strategy that is most appropriate during unstable times. Naturally, the opposite is also possible. So if an organization perceives the environment as unstable because of environmental turbulence, it might adjust their strategy to a strategy that fits this environment. Following this

reasoning, schools which experience a teacher shortage will most likely perceive the environment as unstable while schools which don’t experience this shortage will be more likely to perceive the environment as stable or certain. In an uncertain environment, prospecting is believed to be the most effective and appropriate strategic stance for public organizations. For a more stable environment, defending is believed to be the best strategic stance. Therefore, primary schools in the Netherlands which experience a teacher shortage will be more likely to perceive the environment as unstable and will thus intend to use the prospecting strategic stance. Primary schools which don’t experience this shortage will most likely perceive their environment as stable and will therefore intend to use a defending strategic stance. This translates into the following hypotheses:

1. Schools which experience a teacher shortage will intend to use the strategic stance prospecting because they perceive the environment as uncertain.

2. Schools which don’t experience a teacher shortage will intend to use the strategic stance defending because they perceive the environment as stable.

It is important to note that this study assumes that a school will perceive their environment as uncertain or stable based on whether the school experiences a teacher shortage or not. However, this study will not be able to measure if the assumed perception corresponds with reality since doing interviews would be needed to achieve this and as mentioned before, the COVID-19 crisis has made this impossible. Schools will be contacted to corroborate the presence or absence of turbulence in the form of a teacher shortage within their environment but this does not guarantee that these schools will perceive the environment as stable or unstable since this perception could be based on various factors like the position of a manager within the organization (Schmidt & Van de Walle, 2019).

Methodology

This chapter will explain the methods which were used to answer the research question. First, the gathering of the data will be explained. Secondly, the most important concepts will be operationalised. Third, the analysis of the data will be discussed. Fourth, the selection of cases will be elaborated. Lastly, the limitations of the chosen method will be discussed.

Data gathering

To uncover the strategic stance of the selected schools, interviews were deemed as the most appropriate method because this method will provide deep insights into what an organization is actually doing thereby revealing information about the realized strategy. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 crisis has greatly increased the workload of primary schools and their managers. Conducting interviews was therefore no longer a possibility because it would be very difficult to find managers that were available for conducting an interview. A good alternative to interviewing as a research method is qualitative document analysis. As mentioned before, this kind of analysis is useful for studying the intended strategy (Boyne and Walker, 2004). In the case of public schools, school plans can be used to do a document analysis.

Every school is required by law to formulate a school plan for a period of 4 years and send it to the inspection of education. Some schools voluntarily choose to publish this plan on their website. Moreover, a school is also allowed to write a school plan for a period shorter than 4 years provided that each schoolyear does have a corresponding school plan. Each school plan should contain a plan for how the school is going to meet the basic quality requirements for primary education. Next to that, the school plan should contain which quality demands the school sets for itself and how those goals are going to be achieved. Thus, the school strategy can be derived from a school plan because this plan entails a vision about which activities the school is going to carry out to reach their goals (Mantere, 2013). Therefore, school plans can be coded and analysed to gain insights about the strategic stance of a school. By comparing the school plans of the selected schools which cope with a teacher shortage with the schools which don’t cope with this problem, an answer to the research questions can be formulated.

Operationalisation

In order to be able to measure the differences between schools, the most important concepts need to be defined and operationalised. Because this study will attempt to compare the different organizational strategies of selected schools, the different types of organizational strategies form the key concepts that need to be operationalised. As explained in the theoretical framework, the different types of strategic stances (prospecting, defending and reacting) will be used to classify different organizational strategies.

Prospecting is a proactive strategy that a school uses when it focusses on the external environment (Boyne & Walker, 2004). For public schools, this could mean that they actively try to cooperate with other schools, experiment/innovate for example with teaching and recruiting or trying to increase the school’s budget. Therefore, the following codes can be used to indicate a proactive organizational stance: external relationship, external action, new procedures and external focus.

Another organizational stance is defending. A school that uses this strategy will try to defend their budget and position in the public sector. They will also wait to implement changes until the effect of these changes is clear. This strategy is also more internally oriented meaning that schools will actively engage in changing things inside their own organization, for example by changing work schemes (Boyne & Walker, 2004). Codes that will be used to indicate that a school intends to use this strategy are protecting budget, waiting to implement changes, internal changes and internal focus.

Reacting is the last type of organizational stance. When a school uses this type of strategy, it will act only when pushed by the environment/external actors. This could result in a lack of a clear formulated strategy (Boyne & Walker, 2004). Schools which use this strategy might also encounter problems and will not attempt to solve these problems. Codes that will be used to indicate the use of this type of strategy are external pressure, lack of vision and problems without solutions.

Beside the different organizational stances, an important concept is the concept teacher shortage. A definition of this concept is provided by Guarino, Santibañez & Daley (2006, p. 175):

‘Teacher shortages occur in a labour market when demand is greater than supply. This can be the result of either increases in demand or decreases in supply or of both simultaneously’

Thus, a school which copes with a teacher shortage needs more teachers than the school currently employs. A logical way to measure if a school has a teacher shortage is to examine the outstanding vacancies during the year. However, attempting to use vacancies to operationalise teacher shortage will result in a few problems. First of all, teacher vacancies are usually filled at the start of one school year because a school class cannot exist without a teacher. In case no qualified teacher is available, the school will often use an unqualified person to teach this class for a schoolyear. This fact might hide the actual teacher shortage within schools (Donitsa-Schmidt & Zuzovsky, 2016). Next to this operational problem, data about outstanding vacancies is not available in the Netherlands. As the Dutch government states, measuring whether schools cope with a teacher shortage would require them to regularly report on their outstanding vacancies, which would result in a big administrative workload (Rijksoverheid, n.d.). Therefore, data about outstanding vacancies is non-existent and cannot be used to measure the presence or absence of a teacher shortage. An alternative way to measure the presence of this shortage is by examining the amount of teachers per student, the so-called student-teacher ratio (Subair & Talabi, 2015). Since two teachers that both work 20 hours can teach the same amount of students as one teacher who teaches 40 hours a week, using the number of fulltime-equivalents (fte’s) is a better way to measure the amount of employed teachers than using the absolute amount of employed teachers. This data is available in the Netherlands in open datasets from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science that provide information about the amount of fte’s per and the number of students per school. In conclusion, the number of fte’s per student will be used to measure the presence or absence of a teacher shortage at Dutch schools because this measurement is reliable and possible.

Data analysis

As mentioned, the school plans of selected schools will be coded in order to be able to determine the strategies used by a selected school. Coding the data from the retrieved school plans can be done using the inductive coding technique or the deductive coding technique (Yi, 2018). The difference between the two methods is whether the researcher starts analysing the documents with a codebook that contains pre-made codes or not. The deductive coding method starts the coding process with such pre-made codes which were drafted using what is already known about the topic as described by relevant literature. The inductive method starts the process without a codebook and develops/refines codes during the coding process. This method is commonly used when not much is known about a topic. Since the theoretical framework of this study has made it apparent that a lot is known about organizational strategies and their aspects, this study will use the deductive coding method to code the school documents.

As described by Flick (2013), the deductive coding process can be executed by following a few different steps. First, an initial codebook will be drafted by using the knowledge gained from the theoretical framework about organizational strategy. This initial codebook will contain several codes, categories and themes. Every code symbolises a salient piece of data (Saldaña, 2015). For example, the statement of a school that it often cooperates with nearby schools can be symbolized by the code external relationship, thereby indicating that the school has a relationship with an external actor. A category differs from this because categories contain multiple codes that belong together (Saldaña, 2015). An example of such a category from this study is the category prospecting which contains the codes external relationship, external action, new procedures and external focus. A theme is essentially the outcome of coding and symbolizes a theoretical concept and can contain multiple categories (Saldaña, 2015).

When the initial codebook is drafted, a first round of coding, the so-called trial coding, will be done (Flick, 2013). This step entails assigning the pre-made codes to parts of text from the school documents. The coding software ATLAS will be used to do so. After this first round, the pre-made codebook will be evaluated and adapted. Naturally, a second round of coding will follow and the codebook will be revised for the second time. This process will repeat itself until the codebook cannot be further improved (Saldaña, 2015). The initial codebook and the final codebook can be found as appendixes with this research.

When the codebook is finalized, the last round of coding will be carried out (Flick, 2013). By assigning codes to all the relevant information within the school plans, this study should be able

to derive conclusions about the strategy use of the selected schools. Next, the information that is gained will be analysed in order to formulate an answer to the research question. The conclusion containing the answer to the research question also contains a reflection on the formulated hypotheses.

An important notion to the used coding method is that every coding process is a subjective process that is dependent on the interpretation of the researcher (Flick, 2013). The accuracy of the coding process and consequently the research itself could be improved by coding the same document with multiple researchers and comparing, discussing and revising the used codes. Unfortunately, this research is carried out by one researcher which makes this accuracy improving method impossible.

Selection of cases

This study aims to uncover whether schools which cope with a teacher shortage use a different strategy than schools which don’t cope with this shortage. Therefore, this study needed to select schools from the total population of schools which experienced a shortage as well as schools which did not experience this shortage. The population of cases consists of all primary schools in the Netherlands. True random selection of cases from the total population usually produces the most valid and reliable selection of cases but this selection method is unfit for this research since it does not guarantee a selection of cases where the condition teacher shortage is present in some cases as well as absent in others. Thus, the cases needed to be divided into groups where one group contains the schools which cope with a teacher shortage and the other group contains schools which don’t cope with a teacher shortage. Random selection could then take place within the different groups to produce a sample of cases which could be used for this research. This method is known as stratified sampling (Neyman, 1992) and was used in this research to produce the selection of cases. However, as will become apparent later, using stratified sampling in the selection process did not produce a selection of cases which could be used for this research because the data from some selected cases was believed to have a high probability of being faulty. Adjusting the selection by reselecting cases randomly would have resulted in an endless selection process since 78% of the selected schools needed to be removed due to the unavailability of their school plan. Therefore, cases that had to be removed were replaced by picking cases that were believed to be a typical case of a school with a teacher shortage or without this shortage. This method is known as typical case sampling which is a

form of purposive case sampling (Etikan, Musa & Alkassim, 2016). The paragraphs below will describe the full case selection process starting with the random selection of cases that resulted in an unusable selection which was adjusted using purposive case sampling in order to make the selection useable.

As mentioned, stratified sampling entails dividing the population into different groups. In order to do this, the operationalisation of teacher shortage as described above was used. Open datasets from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science about the year 2018 were used to gather data about the number of fte’s and students per school because these datasets were the most recent datasets that were marked as definitive. First, this data was combined in one dataset. Second, the amount of fte’s was divided by the number of students, resulting in the number of students per fte. Third, schools that missed data about one of these two variables were deleted. Fourth, data about fte’s that could not be attributed to one school was deleted (4.445,5 fte out of the total of 124.720,0 fte = 3,56%). This data entails fte’s of people who were paid by and worked for several schools. Therefore, the government was not able to attribute these fte’s specifically to one school. All of the above steps resulted in the following data distribution:

Graph 1: Number of students/fte overview of schools

An important notion with this data is that the fte per school does not consists of teachers alone but school principals and supporting staff are part of the total amount of fte’s too. Examples of jobs that fall into the category supporting staff are janitors, administrators and teaching assistants. The reason for including these fte’s in this research is that schools which have a lot of supporting staff or spare management fte’s might not experience a teacher shortage since these fte’s can fill the gaps by teaching classes (although this is not lawfully permitted). The

0,0 10,0 20,0 30,0 40,0 50,0 60,0 0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 STUD EN TS /F TE SCHOOLS (CUMULATIVE)

Number of students/fte

union for educational supporting staff points out that this happens regularly nowadays in the Netherlands (Poortvliet, 2018). The Dutch educational inspection noticed that this phenomenon was already developing in 2014 at high schools and that not only supporting staff but also school principals taught classes when necessary (Inspectie van het onderwijs, 2014). This turned out to happen at primary schools too (Dujardin, 2018). Thus, supporting staff and management fte’s can be used to cope with a teacher shortage. It is likely that by doing this on a structural basis for a few years (possibly since 2014 or before), these schools don’t experience a teacher shortage because they are used to the status quo of using other personnel than teachers to teach classes. When this is the case, the contextual condition of a teacher shortage is not present which could alter the results of this study. Therefore, these fte’s were included in the data. As will be discussed later, the sample which was selected will be checked for large amounts of non-teaching fte’s.

In the year 2018, the percentage of vacancies in primary education was 6% (Sapulete, Wester, Jelicic & Vankan, 2019). This means that for the total amount of fte’s needed in primary education, 6% of those fte’s were vacant on average throughout the year. If all of these vacancies were concentrated at the schools in the top 6% of the fte/student ratio, those schools would form the group were the condition teacher shortage is present. Of course, this is not the case because the teacher shortage is a national phenomenon that varies between regions and is not concentrated at just a few schools (Inspectie van het onderwijs, 2019). Therefore, the number of 6% was arbitrarily divided by 3 making the 2% schools with the highest fte/student ratio part of the first group for the selection.

The other group used to select schools needed to contain schools which did not experience a teacher shortage. Again, if the vacancies were concentrated at the schools in the top 6% of the fte/student ratio, the other 94% of the schools would form the group were the condition teacher shortage is absent. As discussed above, this is not the case but it can be logically assumed that a school with an average fte/student ratio does not cope with a teacher shortage. Therefore, the middle 50% of schools were designated as the second group.

To randomly select cases, the first group of schools were given the nominal value 1 which represents that the condition teacher shortage is present. The middle 50% of schools were given the nominal value 2 which represents that the condition teacher shortage is absent. The first group contained 133 schools and the second group contained 3328 schools out of the total population of 6657. Using the creation of random numbers for each school, the 5 first schools with the number 1 were selected and the 5 first schools with the number 2 were selected. The

number of cases to study was set at 10 because this number falls well between the range of appropriate number of cases for qualitative studies (Toshkov, 2016). Furthermore, this amount of cases to study fits the available amount of time and recourses.

However, this first selection of cases could not be used as the final selection of cases for a number of reasons. First of all, some selected schools had not published their school plan online. This missing data made an analysis impossible since these documents are the only data source used for this research. Therefore, schools without an available school plan were removed from the selection. A second problems with the first selection of cases was that the schoolyears that were covered by a school plan differed between schools. Some schools already published the school plan for 2020 thereby replacing the old one while simultaneously making the old school plan unavailable. This poses a problem for this study because data from the year 2018 was used to measure the presence of a teacher shortage. A school plan for the year 2020 and beyond might not relate back to the situation in 2018. It is far more likely that a school will determine how to act in the year 2019 based on the situation in 2018. Therefore, schools without an available school plan that contained the year 2019 were also removed from the selection. When a school was removed from the selection for one of the above standing reasons, a new school was selected with the same value of the removed school (1 or 2). The same random ranking of schools was used for this, so the school with the 6th position on the list was selected and the 7th after that and so on. This process was repeated until 10 schools were selected which published a school plan which contained the year 2019. The selection process as explained above has resulted in the following selection:

Group Number BRIN-number

Name City

1 1 21PU RK Bs De Diedeldoorn EMMEN 1 2 03QN Basisschool Edith Stein VEGHEL

1 3 11MB Chr Bs de Hoekstien SURHUISTERVEEN

1 4 10SZ Obs Jaarfke SCHEEMDA

1 5 03VI Basissch Maria ter Heide VEGHEL

2 6 11IQ De Eskampen PEIZE

2 7 27MB El Amien II AMSTERDAM

2 8 23RH De Fontein ALPHEN AAN DEN

RIJN 2 9 08ZB RK Maria School WIERDEN 2 10 26PN OBS De Notenkraker DEN HAAG

Table 1: first selection of schools

Group Number fte/

student Students Total fte Total fte Teachers Total fte Management Total fte Supporting Staff Total 1 1 23,5 162 6,9 6,9 0,0 0,0 1 2 20,3 140 6,9 6,5 0,0 0,4 1 3 20,0 154 7,7 7,2 0,4 0,1 1 4 20,2 150 7,4 6,7 0,7 X 1 5 21,2 111 5,2 5,2 0,0 0,0 2 6 15,7 276 17,6 14,4 0,9 2,3 2 7 13,3 321 24,1 16,3 1,2 6,6 2 8 14,6 170 11,6 9,4 0,7 1,5 2 9 12,9 134 10,4 7,5 1,6 1,5 2 10 14,3 365 25,6 20,1 2,9 2,6

Table 1 and 2 display the selected schools including details about the school, the amount of students and the amount of fte’s. A few notions about this selection are very important and worth discussing.

First of all, a very high percentage of schools needed to be removed from the selection because the school plans of these schools could not be used for this research. The vast majority of the removed schools did not publish their school plan on the school’s website or on any other website. A few schools needed to be removed for the earlier mentioned reason that the available school plan did not include the year 2018. In sum, 78% schools needed to be removed before the above displayed selection could be made.

A second important remark is that table 2 shows that a lot of schools within group 1, the group that is assumed to experience a teacher shortage, have reported 0,0 management fte’s and/or supporting staff fte’s. In the appendix of the data, the government (whom published the data) states that all displayed numbers relate to actual fte’s higher than 0. This means that all 0,0 scores in the table relate to fte’s between 0 and 0,1. However, the government also notes that they rely upon the schools themselves to accurately communicate the data to them so the data might contain errors. Since 0,1 fte (equal to 4 hours) is very little time to manage a school, the possibility that the 0,0 scores are faulty can be assumed to be high. If this is in fact the case, the data would be distorted and the indication of the teacher shortage being present could be inaccurate. The analysis that aims to uncover the relationship between the teacher shortage being present and the organizational strategy will consequently be based on a faulty assumption that a school experiences a teacher shortage. All inferences that will be made about a school that has a wrong indication about the presence of a teacher shortage will be inaccurate. Therefore, faulty data would have a major impact on the accuracy of the conclusions of this research. To solve this problem, all schools were contacted to confirm that the data accurately indicated the presence of a teacher shortage in the year 2018. Schools claiming that the data did not accurately indicated the presence or absence of a teacher shortage were removed and the random selection process as described earlier could have been repeated. However, a lot of schools needed to be removed and the high unusable/missing data rate of 78% would have resulted in an endless selection process that would have put a strain on the limited amount of time and resources available for this research. Therefore, the decision was made to contact all schools to corroborate the accuracy of the data and to remove the schools that didn’t while replacing them with purposive selected instead of random selected schools. The reason for using purposive selecting to select the replacement schools is that this method decreases the amount

of time and resources needed to select new schools because schools can be handpicked that are most likely to cope with a teacher shortage or not. This purposive selecting was done within the previously formed groups 1 and 2 and was based on whether the number of teaching, management and supporting staff fte’s were logical. Again, schools which did not publish their school plan or published a school plan that did not entail the year 2018 were removed. The above standing method has resulted in the following selection:

Group Number

BRIN-number

Name City

1 1 10HY RK Basissch de Roelevaer ROELOFARENDSV EEN

1 2 08QO Basisschool St Pieter MAASTRICHT 1 3 11MB Chr Bs de Hoekstien SURHUISTERVEEN 1 4 15TG OBS De TWA Fisken GROU

1 5 12KU De kwikstaart UITHOORN

2 6 11IQ De Eskampen PEIZE

2 7 27MB El Amien II AMSTERDAM

2 8 23RH De Fontein ALPHEN AAN DEN

RIJN 2 9 08ZB RK Maria School WIERDEN 2 10 10VA Basisschool Jan Thies ROLDE

Group Number fte/ student Students Total fte Total fte Teachers Total fte Management Total fte Supporting Staff Total 1 1 21,6 264 12,2 10,5 0,8 0,9 1 2 20,2 301 14,9 12,6 1,0 1,3 1 3 20,0 154 7,7 7,2 0,4 0,1 1 4 19,7 282 14,3 12,3 0,8 1,2 1 5 19,7 601 30,5 27,6 1,0 1,9 2 6 15,7 276 17,6 14,4 0,9 2,3 2 7 13,3 321 24,1 16,3 1,2 6,6 2 8 14,6 170 11,6 9,4 0,7 1,5 2 9 12,9 134 10,4 7,5 1,6 1,5 2 10 15,4 297 19,3 16,0 1,0 2,3

Table 4: fte and student info of selected schools (definitive)

Four schools from group 1 were removed from the previous selection because they argued that the data did not accurately indicate the presence of a teacher shortage. Therefore, the previously made expectation about the data being faulty turned out to be true for 80% of the schools in group one. One school in group 2 could not be contacted and was therefore also removed. The rest of the schools, including the purposively selected schools, confirmed that the data accurately indicated the absence or presence of a teacher shortage.

The overview of information about the definitive selection of schools shows one salient detail. School number 7 has a total of 6,6 supporting staff fte’s which is a very high number in comparison to the other schools since the second highest score of supporting staff fte is 2,6. The ratio of supporting staff fte’s to teaching fte’s is also relatively high for this school. If this school did not have such a high amount of supporting staff fte’s, the fte/student ratio would be 18,3 (instead of 13,3) which is very close to the lowest fte/student ratio of a selected school which experienced a teacher shortage (19,7). Thus, if this school did not use supporting staff fte’s for teaching classes, this school would most likely experience a teacher shortage. However, this school corroborated that it did not experience a teacher shortage in the year 2018. Therefore, it can be assumed that this school has not experienced this shortage because they have been