The new educational MIR will have half the places but will cease to be a pilot test
The same teacher will have to accompany the novices and the students in internships, and the directors criticize that the project does not have enough budget
BarcelonaThree academic years ago, the Department of Education, then led by the ERC government, created Sensei, a pilot program that was intended to be the foundation for creating a training program. Over time, it was meant to eventually transform into a MIR for teachers, similar to the one for doctors. The pilot was launched with a budget of eleven million euros that came from European funds. With this investment, 250 spots were offered over three academic years to train novice teachers. However, these funds only covered the Sensei program for three years, and therefore, last school year was the last one in which the Catalan education system had the pilot program for this long-awaited educational MIR. Now, to replace it, the Department of Education has launched a new training program that will be stable –unlike Sensei–, but which will have half the number of spots and will not have its own budget, but rather will be integrated into the investment that the Government makes in the teaching staff.
"Once the temporary Sensei program concluded, the department developed a mentor center program with the goal of having its own permanent and consolidated model for professional development," argues the Director General of Innovation, Digitalization and Curriculum, Sònia Fernández Cuenca, to ARA. Broadly speaking, the program will allow novice teachers who are already in the job bank but have less than six months of experience to be working a part-time paid position, training at a center with the supervision and accompaniment of a mentor and learning by co-teaching. "It is about fostering the formative continuity of novice teachers and linking their initial training with their first experience at the center," describes Fernández Cuenca.
However, even though the operation is very similar to Sensei, the resources are scarcer, and this worries school administrations. While Sensei offered 250 spots, the new program, for practical purposes, will end up offering about seventy. The Department of Education opened the call thinking it could have a maximum of 140 training centers—with Sensei there were 55—and that each of the centers would host a novice teacher. However, when the call closed at the end of September, only about seventy centers had proposed to offer this type of support to new teachers, and it still remains to be verified that they all meet the necessary requirements to be trainers. In this way, it is very likely that a third of the teachers who participated in the now-defunct Sensei will end up accessing this new training modality.
On the other hand, while the Sensei plan offered support to novice teachers in schools and also in institutes, now the program will be offered only to institutes and school-institutes. The Department of Education's forecast is for these novice teachers to arrive at the centers in January 2027.
All these differences have caused some concern—and some rejection—among school administrations. "They wanted to do the same program without money, and without resources it is impossible," denounces Jordi Satorra, president of AXIA, the Professional Association of Executives in the Educational Field. The also director of the Antoni de Martí i Franquès Institute in Tarragona, furthermore, denounces that Sensei has been unified with the program for hosting students doing internships for the master's degree in secondary education. "Because of all this, we, who had been a mentor center for seven years, will stop being part of the program this year," he asserts.
Guiding novices and interns at the same time
Satorra insists that the unification of these programs entails an increased workload and that it has not been communicated correctly to the schools. "They did it without warning and without asking for the opinion of the schools that were already doing it or the management teams," he criticizes. In this sense, the former Sensei program provided that the mentor teacher could accompany up to three novice teachers. Now, however, it is only expected that there will be one novice teacher per school. The problem, however, will be that the mentor teacher who will be released for half a day to carry out the mentoring will have to take on the accompaniment of the novice and, in addition, that of the student teachers.
At this point, the president of AXIA complains that, regarding the hosting of student teachers, it is very difficult for schools to have a forecast of how many they will have and that it is not clear what teaching resources the school has to accompany these students. "We have about 30 each year and we had to fight to ensure that, instead of half a resource, they gave us one," he denounces.