One out of every four teachers could change school next academic year

BarcelonaNext school year, the stability of teaching staff at schools and institutes in Catalonia will suffer a new jolt. Starting this Thursday, the application period for the state transfer competition in Catalonia opens. This is a process that takes place throughout Spain every two years and is an opportunity for teachers who are already civil servants to change schools. As ARA has learned, the Department of Education estimates that some 20,500 civil servant teachers will have to participate in this procedure. Taking into account that the public network has about 85,000 teachers this year, the transfer competition could cause the mobility of one in four active teachers and professors, although in many cases there are teachers who already want to stay at the school where they are and succeed in doing so.

In this biannual musical chairs, there will be 20,500 compulsory participants, those who are obliged to participate in the process because they are civil servants who have finished their internship phase and have not yet participated in any competition to opt for a permanent position, or because they are civil servants who have a provisional position. In addition, it is also necessary to include those teachers who do have a permanent position but want to change their destination. In this sketch, two more profiles must also be added: teachers from the rest of the State who want to come to teach in Catalan classrooms and teachers who were already teaching in Catalonia and want to move to centers in other communities.

Although the transfer competition represents an opportunity for teachers to be able to work at the school or in the area that suits them best, and the number of compulsory participants is lower than in the last state competition of 2024, in which 35,000 civil servants had to compete, the movement of chairs for the next school year worries the directors.

"The impact of rotations can be totally different in one center compared to another. We, for example, already have 75 permanent teachers, therefore, we will not notice it as much, but other centers may find themselves in a situation where 60% of their staff changes," explains the director of the Antoni Martí i Franquès Institute in Tarragona, Jordi Satorra. The also president of AXIA (Professional Association of Executives in the Educational Field) explains that those who may suffer the most are the centers of greater complexity, where they usually already have high turnover because it is difficult to attract teachers, making it hard to carry forward school and institute projects. Even so, Satorra admits that it is likely that the impact of the competition will be less than in other editions, since in recent years many teachers and professors have become permanent.

However, to try to protect center projects as much as possible, Satorra reminds that school directors are once again demanding that the Government be able to freeze more positions and make more of them profiled. All this after one of the agreements signed with the unions CCOO and UGT was, precisely, reduce to a minimum the number of positions that could depend on the choice made by a center's management team.

Ustec wants all of them to be put out to tender

While directors are asking to freeze more positions, the Ustec union – the majority in the sector – is asking for the opposite: that all positions that are "available", whether they are profiled or not, be included in the transfer contest that begins this Thursday. "What we want is for the harmful effects of the staffing decree to end because the filling of jobs must always be by seniority, merit, and capacity, as in all public administrations," insists the spokesperson, Iolanda Segura.

Segura explains that they also request that if a teacher participates voluntarily because they already have a permanent position they do not want, and they win a different one, they must be obliged to occupy it. In other words, they should not be able to request a service commission – when, despite having a permanent position, one asks for a position in another center – unless it is for a cause of force majeure. "Otherwise, at the system level, they are occupying two positions, their permanent one and the other provisional one," she warns.