The first of a new series on life as a half-Dane
Danes temporarily trapped after African coup
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28 March - 5 April 2013 | Vol 16 Issue 13
From egg hunts to bunnies: Your guide to Easter
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Denmark’s only English-language newspaper | cphpost.dk SCANPIX / ALBERTO E RODRIGUEZ
NEWS
Pork, beef or horse? Who really knows? Food minister is “furious” after the latest meat scandal
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NEWS
No Danish allowed New coalition in Greenland looks to ban Danish from the parliamentary speaker’s rostrum
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The tower behind the Thrones
NEWS
Exclusive interview with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the rising Danish star of ‘Game of Thrones’ Visitors can meet a variety of sea life at Den Blå Planet, which hopes to become a tourist hit
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SPORT
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It’s official: Teacher lockout to take effect on April 2 CHRISTIAN WENANDE
Back on the road to Rio! Denmark have resurrected their World Cup hopes by defeating the Czechs, but must beware Bulgaria
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Talks break down, leading to a lockout that will affect some 875,000 school children and adult learners nationwide
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ALF a million public school students headed into their Easter breaks with their families not knowing when they will be able to return to their schools. Talks between the finance minister, Bjarne Corydon (Socialdemokraterne), and the teachers association, Lærernes Centralorganisation, collapsed on Monday, meaning that some 17,000 state-employed teachers will be locked out following the Easter break. That puts the state-employed educators – primarily teachers at
after-school institutions and technical schools – in the same boat as their council-employed counterparts, who saw their talks with local government association KL officially break down last week on Friday. Both negotiations ended when the parties were unable to come to terms on teachers’ working hours. Anders Bondo Christensen, the head of the teachers’ union Danmarks Lærerforening (DLF), said the teachers never stood a chance in the talks. “The result was written beforehand,” Christensen said according to public broadcaster DR. “It couldn’t be changed by so much as a comma. I have never experienced negotiations like this. It is completely grotesque and absurd.” According to DR, the lockout will affect some 875,000 students nation-
wide, as the 566,660 public school students will be joined by over 20,000 adult foreigners in language classes, 24,000 children in after-school institutions, and tens of thousands of students in other state and council-run learning centres. Schools around the country were forced to prepare for an impending lockout, and at many schools, the number of teachers who will be available to teach students during the lockout is expected to be despairingly low. Some teachers have been asked to hand in school keys and won’t receive pay, while other schools have drawn up emergency plans and only 10,350 teachers will be available to cater to 500,000 students, or about one teacher for every 55 students. “By far, most of the children won’t
be able to go to school, and at many of the schools, there won’t be more than three or four adults. They can’t watch over all the children,” the leader of headteachers’ union Skolelederne, Anders Balle, told Politiken newspaper. “The only [teachers] I can use are the ones outside the unions.” Last Friday was the last chance for KL and DLF to reach an agreement before the Easter break. Negotiations collapsed on two separate occasions during the evening. At a KL meeting last week, the organisation’s head, Erik Nielsen (Socialdemokraterne), said that the DLF are “trapped in a time capsule from the previous century”, that they are “naysayers” and that the current teacher
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Lockout continues on page 3