News in vocational training: 7,500 new places are opened, registration is brought forward and half a thousand teachers will be hired

BarcelonaThe Catalan government is getting down to work on one of the main problems facing post-compulsory education in Catalonia: the mess with places and pre-registration for vocational training (FP). The president, Salvador Illa, announced this Thursday that next year there will be 7,583 new FP places in Catalonia. The increase in supply will also be accompanied by almost 500 new FP teachers, a sector in which Catalonia continues to have problems finding teachers. "If we need new professionals, we must find the spaces to train them," Illa argued.

The professional family that will notice this increase in classroom seats the most will be the health sector, which will have 1,193 more places. In second place are all the vocational training studies in administration and management (637 places), physical and sports activities (543), commerce and marketing (509), computing and communications (507), hospitality and tourism (453), transport and vehicle maintenance (379), sociocultural services to the community (277), 2.7.

Three registration rounds

Beyond the increase in places, to avoid the chaos at the beginning of last year's school year, when there were 30,000 students waiting for a place when classes had already started, the big news is the remodelling of the pre-registration for the next course, which can be done online, will be brought forward and will allow people to reject places. "We cannot have students waiting for so long without knowing where they will end up," the President of the Government has justified.

In practice, the pre-registration process will begin on May 22, when the total number of places available will be known. The following day, and for a week (until May 30), the application can be submitted to request a place in the studies that the student wants. In this decision, it will be insisted that the student choose more than one option, so that they have more chances of obtaining the place.

Once this period has finished, there will be three rounds to accept the place and enrol. The first will be for students who obtain a place in the first option they had requested. These students will receive an SMS and an email with a link where they can choose: either accept the place and enroll or renounce it. The fact that it can be shown that the place is rejected, according to the Government, should promote the release of vacancies when a student has pre-registered, but ultimately does not enroll, something that more than 15,000 students did last year.

In the second round, all students who have not entered the first option they had requested will go. They will be informed of the place assigned to them and, from there, they have three options: accept it and enroll, reject it completely or leave it as it is. standby

Finally, in a third phase, places will be assigned to all the students who were still pending. Those who already had a place in the previous round and have managed to improve it will be assigned this option directly. All these students will have two days to confirm their online registration, which will end on July 31, unlike last year, when the last attempt could still be made in September, with the course already started.

With this new procedure, the re-evaluation in September for students who had not obtained a place or who, after failing the selectivity, chose to try a training cycle is eliminated. Instead, there will be a system similar to the live registration for primary and secondary school. Thus, a virtual map will be active with the vacant places so that interested students can come to the center to enroll.

Make it easier

One of the main objectives of the change in pre-registration is to make the whole procedure simpler. For this reason, several SMS notifications will be sent to students so that they do not miss the deadlines, prior guidance will be intensified and simpler language will be used throughout the process.

In addition, after last year some 15,000 students did not get a place because they were missing documentation or there were errors in the pre-registration, Educació has explained that next year "the algorithm will be proactive" when checking the qualification of the applicants to "anticipate" possible errors. On the other hand, a pre-registration simulator will also be created so that students can practice before making their applications.

Another of the novelties for the next year will be that the reservation of places in higher grades will be increased to 50% for students who have done a medium grade. The objective is to make it easier for them to continue their career in the same professional family.