Throughout my schooling, I was one of the few children of immigrants in the classroom. My parents came from Morocco, and I was born and raised in Barcelona. Like so many Catalans, I grew up watching and enjoying Club Super3, where they aired shows like... Dragon Ball and DoraemonThanks to this audiovisual content, many of us children who didn't come from Catalan-speaking families became familiar with Catalan, which is now part of our identity. Growing up as children of immigrants isn't easy. You're born into a very complicated economic and social reality, sometimes compounded by episodes of discrimination and racism. Like many young people who have shared the same baggage, we became aware of the importance of education as a way to progress socially and aspire to a better life. Now, little by little, the result of these individual efforts is allowing many of us to become teachers, doctors, writers, and engineers. Now that I work as a secondary school teacher, I find that classrooms are more culturally diverse than in my day, but I'm still one of the few children of immigrants who are teachers. According to data from the Statistical Institute of Catalonia, 225,000 students in the education system are foreign-born. This figure doesn't include all Catalan students with immigrant roots. Students with a migratory background are the group that presentsMore school failure in CataloniaThis phenomenon refers to students who do not obtain their ESO (Compulsory Secondary Education) diploma. Andreu Domingo and Jordi Bayona are two researchers who have analyzed this phenomenon. In their research, they differentiate between foreign students born outside Catalonia and Catalan students with an immigrant parent. Regarding foreign students, their poor results are explained by their late entry into the education system, which makes it difficult for them to adapt. Both researchers focus on understanding why Catalan students with foreign roots obtain worse academic results. The socioeconomic problems they face are one of the reasons. Another point to highlight is the direct correlation between a higher concentration of students of foreign origin in certain schools and a high rate of academic failure. This leads to what the authors call the "neighborhood effect," in which the negative circumstances of the student's environment influence their academic performance and future prospects. Ultimately, they end up reproducing the social conditions and inequalities of their parents, and their situation of poverty and social stagnation becomes chronic, with little room for improvement.

The fourth day of negotiations between the government and teachers' unions ended without an agreement, but with a significant convergence of positions. After hours of meetings, the unions left on Friday with a new salary proposal from the Department of Education, although they still consider it insufficient. As the department explained, teachers have been offered a 25% increase in their specific supplement over four years, meaning that by 2030, teachers will earn approximately €2,500 more per year than they currently do. The offer is €1,000 higher than the previous proposal. the first proposal that Educació put on the table Last week, and in practical terms, this would mean that teachers would receive approximately 180 euros more gross per month. However, USTEC, the largest teachers' union, has already stated that it does not welcome the offer. "Although we appreciate the effort to present us with an improved proposal, it is still insufficient because it in no way resolves the salary injustice that teachers in Catalonia have suffered for many years," warned USTEC spokesperson Iolanda Segura. Similarly, UGT spokesperson Lorena Martínez stated that they will not accept "any proposal that is not formal and in writing, that does not involve a budgetary commitment from the administration, and that does not genuinely address the outstanding demands of the teaching staff." Despite the salary obstacle, both unions and the Catalan Ministry of Education have acknowledged that negotiations have progressed. In fact, the USTEC spokesperson has stated that "generally speaking" a consensus has been reached on the points of the proposal related to inclusive education, reducing bureaucratic burdens, and increasing democracy in schools. However, Segura cautions that this convergence of positions still needs to be "specifically implemented."

Teachers are on strike with the astonishing support of the politicians who have been governing Catalan education in recent years. Esther Niubó asserted that this strike "requires the full support of the Catalan government." Teachers' discontent is real, and it's good that it's being acknowledged. But is it understood that the problem cannot be solved by propping up the system with band-aids while simultaneously asking schools to resolve all the issues that social change is bringing to the forefront? These issues affect the relationship between families and schools, the meaning and purpose of knowledge, the status of authority, and ultimately, the role of schools in society.

After the chaos caused by the error that forced the Ministry of Education to repeat more than 50,000 teaching awards in the month of July, schools and institutes face the school year with an uncertainty that has been present for years: which teachers will be added to their teaching staff. One of the most unpredictable pieces of this puzzle is the number of teachers who, once the final appointments for the school year have been made (on June 11, using data from vacancies as of the end of May), are leaving their jobs. A situation that, according to data provided by the department to ARA, 1,319 teachers have experienced this summer, either due to retirement, because they have changed jobs, or because they have moved to other regions—many to the Valencian Country—leaving their positions empty at a time when the mechanism for filling them is halted during the summer holidays.

The Department of Education has reacted swiftly to the chaos it itself generated with the monumental error in allocating places for the next academic year. An error that has forced the process to start all over again: the rectification has been made in record time. Very well. But this is the only good news in the mess we've witnessed these past few days.

The chaos generated by the incidents in the allocation of teaching positions for the next school year has claimed its first victim in the Department of Education. Minister Esther Niubó, who appeared before Parliament on Tuesday to explain the case, announced the dismissal of the department's Deputy Director General of Staff, Provisions, and Payroll, Enric Trens. She accused him of "errors" in the allocation process. This forced the cancellation of the distribution of 57,000 jobs and affected 2,898 teachers."We are facing a serious and unacceptable act that affects the credibility of the Catalan education system," she lamented.

Less than two months before the start of the school year, the Department of Education has halted the allocation of teaching and professor positions for the next academic year, which was due to close this week, and has admitted that it will have to start the entire process from scratch. According to the report, The Vanguard As ARA has been able to confirm, the reason behind this decision is that there has been a "detection of unjustified incidents" that have led to a pool of positions that were supposed to be awarded to civil servants being assigned to temporary staff. All of this requires a redo of the entire allocation process, which cannot be completed until at least next week. This year, there were at least 50,000 positions at stake.

Denmark is one of the countries that, year after year, leads the rankings in student competency, with an education system that is characterized by being completely free from primary school to university, and which differs significantly from the teaching system in Catalonia. Carolina Diarte (46 years old, born in Castellar del Vallès), knows this well. She has lived in the Scandinavian country for 18 years, where she has worked as a secondary school teacher for 15 years. She didn't expect to end up teaching in a high school in Denmark, but after meeting her Danish partner in Japan, they decided to live together in Copenhagen. Carolina had studied translation and interpreting in Barcelona, ​​​​which helped her find work as a teacher.

The opportunity to spend a few years in the land of the pharaohs doesn't come along often, so when it presented itself in 2022 to Alba Ruiz, a 34-year-old teacher from Mataró, and her husband, with whom they had just had a child, they decided to take advantage of it. He had been offered the option of temporarily moving to Egypt for work, and she requested a leave of absence from the school where she had been working for eight years, San José in her hometown, so she could travel. "It was now or never," she explains.

"Hello teacher, my son is always hungry at 10:30 and recess is at 11:00. Could you please bring forward the time for recess?" "I would appreciate it if you did not use red pens to mark my son's exams. Red is a very aggressive colour and makes him anxious. Could you use a pastel pink or aqua green?" With these examples, primary school teacher Gerard Alarcón, who has more than a million followers on social media, gave a parody on his Instagram account, with cases that were not real, of the requests that families currently make to the teaching staff.

When the Department of Education and Vocational Training launched the Sensei Program –temporary initial teaching residency program The management team and coordinators of the Migdia School in Girona thought that the program would be an opportunity for the entire educational community. They proposed it to the teaching staff and everyone agreed. "We are now in the second year of this pilot plan and we are delighted," says the current director, Marta Massó, who was then head of studies. The program is a two-year pilot test, which began in 2023-24 and will end this year, and which combines half a day of teaching and half a day of training with the aim of implementing a kind of MIR (similar to that of doctors) but aimed at teachers and professors in the future.

Under 48 hours before a new day of industrial action in state schools, head teachers from 300 schools have signed a letter addressed to Catalan Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, to which ARA has had access, in which they warn that the situation in schools is "unsustainable": "There is a real risk that the whole public education system will collapse and the functioning of state schools with minimum quality standards will no longer be guaranteed". The statement asks the minister for "measures not words" after "repeated" demands made by schools to the Department.

There is no more margin to seek an agreement. The mess between unions and the Department of Education has materialized with the resolution published this Tuesday at noon on schools' internal portal, informing them of the staff they will have next year. This document does not include the 1,463 extra teachers the Department had promised as a last minute gesture, in exchange for accepting one of the unions' main demands, a reduction in the number of teaching hours for primary and secondary school teachers. But the unions demanded that this measure also be applied in secondary schools from September onwards, a point that the Department claims is neither economically nor technically feasible and proposed a delay until the following academic year, in 2023-24. The unions rejected this and, in the end, staff numbers will be more or less the same as this year, or even lower, if the State does not renew covid funds which allow to pay the thousand of substitute teachers schools had throughout the pandemic. The Department expects a hectic end of the school year.

Today was the first of the five days of industrial action called by education unions in this month of March. Unions called for mass participation to protest against the Education Department's policies and to demand improvements to the sector. At the moment, union USTEC claims that participation has been massive and exceeded expectations. The unions estimate that around 60% of school teachers have taken part in the strike, whereas Aspepc, a secondary school teachers' union, believes it is 75%. The Education Department, however, says that only 31.3% of state school teachers struck, according to data reported by 87.5% of school. At chartered schools, only 8.7% of teachers went on strike, according to data reported by 69.7% of schools. The unions claim more workers would have gone on strike had it not been for "abusive" minimum services requirements, but even so they claim the demonstration is "historical" and the strike "very massive".

Half of the applicants to study a degree in teaching at any Catalan university have not passed the personal aptitude tests (PAPs), carried out since 2017 with the aim of making the requirements to become a teacher more demanding and giving the teaching profession more prestige. Only 51.58% of the 4,236 people who took the tests on April 10 have provisionally passed them, as published on the website Unportal. The figure is 12 points lower than last year, in which 63.3% of the students passed PAPs, and the lowest number of passes ever recorded -until now, the pass rate had not fallen below 59%-. It is a "significant and alarming" drop, according to organisers, which forces all the institutions involved to make an "urgent reflection" on teacher training.