Another botch in Education

Governments change hands and ministers change, but the Department of Education repeatedly botches up its performance. Perhaps the political class isn't getting ahead. Or perhaps there's a structural problem of malfunctioning within the department. Perhaps both. The fact is that the department's poor governance of the school world only provides additional and recurring reasons for complaint to a profession already sufficiently prone to defeatism.

The management of temporary teaching staff and the allocation of positions is a classic of the tangles at the end and beginning of each school year. This time, things had gone smoothly enough: it seemed the issue was resolved. Well, no. It turns out that an error occurred, which is unclear whether computer-related or human-related, which resulted in prioritizing nearly a thousand teaching positions to temporary teaching staff over civil servants. The result is that the entire process, which involves 50,000 places, must be restarted from scratch. In practice, this means that a large portion of schools and institutes will have to redesign their organizational charts and schedules based on the new allocations. The internal scheduling and organization work will have to be repeated in many cases. Right now, 50,000 teachers don't know for sure where they will end up next school year.

Reactions have been swift, including requests from some groups to delay the start of the school year. Of course, this cannot be the solution: students cannot be harmed, as they are, or should be, the absolute priority of the entire community. The discontent of those affected and the school administrations is understandable, but the solution cannot involve harming the most vulnerable and critical stakeholders.

It would also be good if, for once, responsibilities were clarified and an explanation of exactly what happened and why. In any professional environment, misconduct has consequences. This must also be the case in public administration. Will there be an investigation and decisive action in the Department of Education? Or, as is unfortunately all too common in our country, will shame be swept under the rug? Problems and shortcomings must be addressed head-on, and to prevent their recurrence, it is advisable to do things differently. Because if everything remains the same, it is more than likely that we will soon experience a similar situation again.

Minister Esther Niubó has apologized to all affected professionals and will appear in Parliament on Tuesday to explain her actions. It would be good if she would go into detail about how such an administrative disaster could have happened, the measures taken to prevent a similar situation from happening again, and the extent of the impact. How will management teams, the vast majority of whom are already on vacation, now manage to redesign staff schedules without having met the new member(s) assigned? Will there be a return to the improvisations that had been common in late August and early September? Another poor start to the school year for an educational world already under considerable strain from consecutive crises.