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.

While the details of this procedure are still being finalized, Ustec—the largest union in the sector—has already warned that it is completely against this way of filling positions. "It's a strategy to appease management and try to demobilize them," says its spokesperson, Iolanda Segura, who criticizes the fact that the measure has not yet been negotiated with the unions.

Segura insists that "jobs should be filled based on seniority and exam scores, and, in the case of temporary staff, by their position on the waiting list," and that this is "the most objective and transparent system." She also admits that some positions must be filled by requiring specific qualifications, but that once a candidate demonstrates these qualifications, the decision of who fills the position should be based on seniority and not through a "handpicked interview."

Two courses without new positions listed

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 process. Conversely, Ustec is demanding the repeal of the staffing decree to "restore democracy to schools and end the practice of handpicking teachers."

However, union sources explain that they do not want to enter into this debate because this is only one of the "many reasons" they have for to demonstrate and go on strike called for February 11"It seems we only care about the calendar [start of courseAnd that's not it. The calendar is just another example of the disregard shown towards our group," insists Segura, who argues that they will take to the streets "both to improve our salaries and to obtain more resources for inclusive education and for a reduction in our workload."