Catalonia will have a competition for teacher transfers every year

BarcelonaCurrently, the public education system in Catalonia has around 90,000 teachers. Within these thousands of professionals there are four different types: temporary teachers who have not taken or passed the exams and do not have a permanent position; teachers who are already civil servants and have a permanent position in the centre they want; teachers who are civil servants and have a guaranteed job, but not in the centre they want; and new civil servants who have a permanent job, but have not yet been able to apply for a place in the school or institute they want to go to.

For the last two profiles, the only way to apply for a place is to participate in the transfer competition. A process that is carried out at the state level every two years and all the teachers in question can participate to try to win a place in any public centre in the State that has places and that are included in the process for that year. In addition, many communities also hold transfer competitions at the regional level, but in the case of Catalonia this option is almost non-existent and for more than 20 years there has not been a competition of this type where only Catalan schools and institutes are at stake. From now on all this is going to change.

As the ARA has been able to find out, Catalonia will hold teacher transfer competitions every year: they will be held alternately, which means that one year – like the current one – a national call will be opened and the next one only Catalan. The department had already announced its intention to hold a transfer competition to Catalonia for next year, but now sources from Education confirm that the intention is for the regional call to be repeated biannually. The same sources point out that the decision is a "response to the need to stabilise the teaching staff after the large processes that have been carried out recently". They also insist that this competition "is an essential tool to offer stability to both professionals and centres in the short and medium term", ensuring "a more solid educational environment with greater planning capacity".

Although it may seem like a change that will only have a very sectorial effect, the impact of this measure on centres will be very noticeable. To give us an idea, in the transfer competition that is currently underway (within the framework of a state call), in Catalonia at least 35,000 teachers who have obtained a place in the competitive examinations of recent years and who have just finished their civil service training or who do not yet have a definitive destination will have to participate.

This implies that next year a third of Catalan teachers could have to change centre, which could cause a major disaster in schools and institutes that will see their teaching staff break up and change from one year to the next. To this proportion we must add the thousands of teachers who, despite having a permanent position awarded, are not the ones they want or wish to change schools and who, therefore, can also try their luck by participating in this year's transfer competition. For all these reasons, Educació calculated that up to 45,000 teachers would opt for the procedure. All these teachers will be able to opt for the 16,000 positions that Education foresees for this process and, in turn, for the number of positions (currently indefinite) that will be free when a teacher with a position leaves it to occupy another of those that are in play.

The stability of the center versus the personal

Beyond the novelty for the coming years, the conditions and the number of places in the current transfer competition have provoked criticism within the educational sector. But among teachers, directors and unions the reason for criticism is the opposite: some believe that there are too many places and others too few. From the Association of Directors of Public Education of Catalonia (AXIA), the group of teachers Clam Educatiu and the Forum Futuros de la Educación have sent a letter to Education warning that "the exceptionally high volume of vacant places will result in a great destabilization of the teaching teams of public schools in the short term and will practically leave them without work."

"In order to get closer to individual stability of the people, what is happening is that the teams are being destabilized. We need the teachers to understand the way the center works and to get involved in the project. If the team is constantly rotating this is impossible," laments the math teacher. She explains that they are worried that the high mobility of teachers will end up affecting students. "The fact that the referents change every now and then can especially harm the relationship with the most vulnerable students," she adds.

On the other hand, several individual teachers have criticized on social networks the small number of places in their specialty and the fact that merits and seniority have more weight than other factors such as the grade obtained in the competitive examinations.

In addition, the USTEC union has also been criticising the number of positions at stake for some time, and claims that structurally there should be more. They insist that this procedure is "the best way to guarantee the stability of the staff" and that not so many positions are offered in order to "prioritise the staff decree", which is the regulation that allows management to profile up to half of the positions in an educational centre so that the teachers who access have the characteristics that are considered most suitable.

"We have one of the highest rates of provisionality within the career civil servants in the State, which is why we have already informed the department that we will challenge the offer of positions in this transfer competition," claims the spokesperson for USTEC, Iolanda Segura. "We believe that what really needs to be done is not being complied with, which is to preserve the right to be able to have a stable and definitive job in a centre," she insists. Segura also argues that, in the opinion of the union, the decree on staff is "subjective and perverse" and that what causes mobility within the centres are "the subjective decisions of some managements".