The great negotiation that must define the future of teachers begins. The Ministry of Education and the sectoral unions sat down at the table this Tuesday to begin defining how they are going to approach the reform of the teaching profession and create, ideally, a teaching statute. It was a very initial meeting in which the groups that will make up the negotiating table were discussed, but it is the first of what is expected to be a major negotiation that includes the ratios of students per class or teacher, teaching hours, location of this group in the large family of civil servants, how they will develop their professional career, from initial training at the faculties to access (the competitive examination system) or retirement, among other issues.
On the one hand, together but not necessarily mixed, the unions CCOO, UGT, ANPE, CSIF, STES, CIG (Galician) and ELA (Basque). On the other hand, the Ministry of Education, which sent the Undersecretary of State for Education, Santiago Roura, to the meeting this Tuesday. Between them and as the object of the negotiation, 784,425 teachers, according to data from the department directed by Pilar Alegría, although not all will be equally affected by the fruit that comes out of this negotiation: there are 569,705 in public centers pending what happens with the officials and 214,720 in private companies that will not be affected by that part.
The first meeting this Tuesday made clear the different approach that unions and the ministry want to take in this negotiation. Union sources present explain that their main interests are in what could be considered working conditions of teachers: the ratios (how many students they have in each class), the weekly teaching hours or the inclusion of all teachers in group A1 of the civil service scale ( now there is a hodgepodge of figures).
The ministry, according to this version, is more interested in addressing more “theoretical” issues, such as competitive examinations, the teaching competence that should mark professional development, the reform of teaching plans or the questioned teacher’s master’s degree. These sources present at the meeting explain that Education is open to approving issues that can be agreed upon in the negotiations so that they come into force before everything is agreed upon.
The teacher representative organizations had been demanding for years that this negotiation should start, which the ministry itself promised to open at the time it included it as an obligation in the Lomloe. But Education limited itself to complying with the minimum within the self-imposed deadline, two years ago, and presented a document with 24 “disjointed” measures (the unions said then) with which it considered it had complied. Among the measures proposed in that document is the creation of a test to access the Teaching profession, an idea that the ministry has been promoting since then. In any case, the matter was left to rest until this Tuesday when, having already completed the regulatory developments of the (not so) new education law, the ministry wants to open what it calls “the teachers’ legislature.”
Ratios and teaching hours
They are two of the main union demands for years. The history of teaching hours, how many weekly classes each teacher teaches, dates back to at least 2012, when former minister José Ignacio Wert increased them as part of the measures approved by the government to contain spending. Years later the socialist ministry partially reversed this measure, but what Wert had done was mandatory, Celáa proposed as a voluntary one. This meant that not all the autonomous communities, which are the ones who set the teaching hours in their territory, have returned to the original ones. The unions ask for 18 in Secondary and 23 in Primary, figures that already exist in many autonomies, but not in all. And the teaching organizations want them to be made mandatory.
Something similar happens with the ratios, which also rose last decade. In this case, however, some organizations are open to a selective, not generalized, reduction. CCOO, for example, proposes that for this issue students with specific educational support needs be counted as two students instead of one, so that in these classrooms, which require more attention, the ratios would drop, but not in the rest.
Another of the central aspects that the unions aim to resolve is the current dispersion of civil service levels among teachers, which range between A2 level 22 for teachers and A1 level 26 for secondary school professors. The union request is that everyone have an A1, given that their “social work and responsibility is maximum.”
In addition, CSIF wants to talk about “recognition of authority in the classroom, the loss of purchasing power of over 20% since the 2010 cuts and the increase in the retirement age”, a demand, the latter, shared by other organizations like UGT.
This union also highlights its shared interest in reducing bureaucracy, or at least the part that falls to teachers. “Despite demanding more and more responsibilities from teachers, the teaching profile and the conditions that regulate their work have not evolved in the same way,” says UGT.
Teaching competencies
The ministry presented an agenda for this Tuesday’s meeting in which it only contemplated the creation of the working groups that will have to carry out the effective negotiation. This document included what appear to be the interests of Education for the entire process: it is proposed to create a group for the framework of professional teaching competencies; one for initial teacher training; for selective systems and entry into the teaching function; for tutoring practices and initiation into teaching; ongoing teacher training; and systems and procedures for teacher professional development.
Perhaps the main novelty among the proposals is in the first group, of professional teaching competencies. This framework of teacher professional development defines different competencies for teachers and acquired levels. These competencies are, according to the document: programming of the learning and teaching process; practice and management of the teaching and learning process; evaluation of the learning and teaching process; comprehensive development and well-being of students and teachers; tutorial action; coexistence and democratic values; participation in the center; commitment to educational improvement and quality; continuing professional development; communicative leadership; digital; and teaching linguistics. Each teacher may have a level between zero and three in each competence, where zero would be the level acquired at the end of initial training and three would be the maximum possible.
The first hand has been dealt, but the game that the future teacher must define is just beginning. Unions and the ministry are aware that the negotiation will be long.
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