Next year, school principals will be able to select more teachers through interviews.

BarcelonaNext year, the principals of public schools and institutes in Catalonia will be able to use an important tool more frequently to adapt their teaching staff to each school's educational project: conducting interviews to select some of the teachers on the staff. However, most positions will continue to be filled based on the order in which teachers appear on the waiting list.

As ARA has learned, the Department of Education plans to expand the circumstances under which teachers can be selected through interviews next year. Interviews will be conducted over a longer period and will be available for more positions. However, this change will also be accompanied by increased inspection efforts to ensure that the profiles of the selected teachers align with the educational project of the school and its administration.

Although the Catalan government has not yet tallied the number of positions that will be subject to this option, the Education Department has told this newspaper that the number of days on which school principals are allowed to conduct interviews to fill positions will be increased. This year, interviews could only be held on one day. Another new development is that interviews will also be permitted to fill positions that previously could not be filled through this method, although neither which positions nor how many have been specified.

Strengthening inclusive education

The department explains that this decision is primarily aimed at strengthening inclusive education, but also at allowing teachers to be added to staff who can meet the specific needs of each school. In this regard, the Government will also expand the specializations (profiles) that can be accredited to apply for a position: profiles will be added in the areas of SIEI Plus (Intensive Support for Inclusive Schooling), hospital classrooms, psychopedagogy in schools, and training and integration programs (PFI). Regarding positions that can be accessed through an interview with the school or institute's administration, the Department of Education anticipates that next year this method can still be used to fill profiled positions—vacations already reserved for teachers to be selected—as has been the case until now. However, administrations will also be allowed to fill positions that cannot be filled through this process. Now, however, it will be necessary to clarify in which cases this mechanism will be accepted and in which it will not.

Two courses without new profiled positions

Despite this expansion of the cases in which school principals can choose teachers, the Department of Education clarifies that no new specialized positions can be opened. In fact, No new places of this type have been allowed to be created since the 2023-2024 academic year, and at that time the proportion did not reach 15% of the total.The ERC government then argued that it was freezing this route to classrooms because it needed to manage the more than 20,000 new civil servants entering the system. It was also stated that the freeze should only last for one year, but the current administration opted to extend it due to the large number of new civil servants who still had to secure their permanent positions this academic year. Catalonia is the only autonomous community that allows school principals to choose a portion of their teaching staff, but other countries outside of Spain also apply this type of selection. In Spain, this mechanism has been implemented through the staffing decree. Broadly speaking, this decree, approved a decade ago, allows principals to create some specialized positions—up to 50% of the staff—according to the needs of the school and, through interviews with candidates who meet these requirements, select the most suitable one.

Now, but the Department of Education is reviewing the regulations to adapt them to the current reality of schools and institutes, and these operational changes fall within this procedure.