Teachers from the Community of Madrid take to the streets this Tuesday and will join a strike to ask the regional government to lower teaching hours, reduce ratios and equalize salaries with other communities. From groups that bring together teachers from across the region, such as the Less Lectivas Assembly, they regret that Madrid is “the only community that has not yet begun the reversal of the 2011 cuts.”
The unions of the Education Sector Board (CCOO, UGT, ANPE and CSIF) have called these concentrations to request an improvement in their working conditions. The march will tour the capital, from Neptuno to Sol, and will include the participation of professionals from the Less Lectivas Assembly. One of its spokespersons explains to this editorial team that Madrid teachers feel overwhelmed by the overload of daily work.
“We are required to provide individualized attention, which we totally agree with, but without having the necessary means to do so,” explains Fernando, a Primary and Early Childhood teacher at a school in the south of the region.
They ask for a “shock plan against bureaucracy”
Madrid teachers, according to the teachers and union leaders interviewed, feel overwhelmed by the bureaucratic tasks assigned to them. In fact, this is one of the points included in the mobilization next Tuesday, the teaching organizations demand “a shock plan against bureaucracy.”
The head of Education at CSIF Madrid, Miguel Ángel González, assures that they spend the day writing “papers for one side” and “papers for another”, but in the end all those documents – and the investment of time necessary to prepare them – “stay in a drawer.” He considers, along those same lines, that he would “take his hat off” if these reports did have a clear purpose, but he insists that “bureaucracy is worthless.”
In the workplace, the promoters of the strike demand from the Ministry of Education that teachers “recover” the teaching schedule of 18 hours per week in Secondary Education, Vocational Training and Special Regime and 23 hours in Early Childhood and Primary Education. Currently, they have two more hours per week after the change that occurred due to the PP’s approval of Royal Decree 14/2012, which imposed cuts and increased the hours of the teaching day. More than a decade later, and taking into account that in other communities they have reduced the workload, the educational community asks the Government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso to go in the same direction.
“We must understand that education is an investment, not an expense, but what this community understands is that education is a business,” says González. His colleague on the Union Table, Esteban Serrano, Secretary of Organization of ANPE-Madrid, adds that there is “enormous unrest” among teachers in regional public education because they see “how in other communities agreements are reached that improve remunerative working conditions, while Madrid is left behind.”
Meeting on Thursday with the counselor
With the strike call already made, the Minister of Education, Emilio Viciana, has called the unions to a meeting to present a proposal, although he has not advanced the content of that working document. The union organizations and Viciana will meet on Thursday at noon in a meeting that the workers’ representatives have been demanding since last September 12 and about which some of their attendees, such as Teresa Jusdado, from UGT, do not have “many expectations.” .
In Workers’ Commissions, Isabel Galvín, head of the educational federation in Madrid, assures that they expect “a massive follow-up” of the demonstration and the strike. Furthermore, he maintains that “he does not think that the call” from the counselor is “serious” because it arrives two months after the course has started and because he does not have an agenda.
From the Education press office they assure that the Ministry “has always reaffirmed its willingness to continue working together” and recognize that the reduction of school hours “seems like a reasonable proposal, but it must be done progressively.”
Some groups, such as the Less Lectivas Assembly, consider that Ayuso’s educational policy is a list of measures announced solely to get headlines, with which it seeks “distraction” and “confrontation.” Her latest proposal has not been well received among teacher organizations. The president advocates including all new public Early Childhood and Primary Schools built in the region that they will have a mandatory split day and will teach 1st and 2nd years of Secondary Education. Compulsory (ESO).
Despite the announcement, the inclusion of first cycle ESO classes in schools is prohibited by educational law, specifically against the provisions of Royal Decree 132/2010, of February 12, which establishes the conditions that secondary schools must meet. , as published by elDiario.es.
“We will try to analyze everything legally, we even threaten to appeal the laws legally if they violate a higher standard,” says González, who regrets, in turn, that the department pillorises its “working conditions.” “Madrid has launched a crusade against public education teachers,” he reviews. For their part, the Less Lectivas Assembly regrets that these proposals seek to “confront teachers and families,” as well as promote the idea that “the school is a parking lot for children.”
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