More diverse and complex classrooms. A worse learning climate. Stagnant salaries for years. A distribution of stressful workday. A lot of temporality and little social recognition despite the increase in pressure. Total absence of public policies focused on teachers and teachers. The teaching profession is increasingly complex by itself, as several recent studies coincide, and without an improvement in the conditions under which professionals suffer these circumstances.
“A growing disaffection and pessimism is emerging in an important part of teachers,” says the report The state of the teaching profession in Spainfrom ESADEECPOL. The text draws what promises in the title and makes a general drawing of a profession that “lives a decisive moment for education in the coming decades.”
Throughout the report, data is offered that support the first statement. A recent study of the SM Foundation reveals that 38% of teachers say they live their work with indifference, a percentage that has been fired since 2007, when it was barely 2%. In addition, 47% of the teaching staff is neutral today due to the possibility of leaving teaching, when 15 years ago eight out of ten rejected it sharply. 60% of teachers who in 2007 said they maintain the illusion for their work today are barely one in four (24%). One last sample: the proportion of teachers who claims to live their profession with distance has triggered 2% to 38% in this period.
“It is necessary to build a more attractive, ambitious, demanding and professionalized profession so that everyone can win,” says Lucas Gortázar, director of Education of ESAdeecpol and author of the report. It has not passed in recent decades, in which all educational reforms that have been – of greater or lesser draft, have not been few – have focused on the structure of the system, the curricular organization and the evaluation. The teaching statute, which just begins to be negotiated, has been delayed years and years.
How have we get here?
The worsening of the conditions in which teachers work in the classroom begins with the decline in the social conditions of childhood, says the report. A decline that manifests at least in three fields.
Child poverty has gone from 29.9% to 34.7% in the last five years; Primary students of immigrant origin are already 32%, which implies that there are more and more class students with a mother tongue that is not Spanish; The third leg of this unstable table is made up of the well -being and mental health of the students, which also worsen. In addition, according to ESADE, Spain is the OECD country where high school teachers claim to be less prepared to teach in contexts of different levels of learning.
Spain is the country of its environment in which the environment has most been degraded in class in recent years, an environment that teachers must manage and that is especially deteriorated in Euskadi, Murcia, Andalusia and Catalunya
With these wicker, the learning climate in the classroom has worsened, as can be seen from the microdates offered by TimS or Pisa tests. A complicated formula prepared by ESADE to group this information shows that Spain is the country of its environment in which the environment has most degraded in class in recent years both in primary and secondary school, an environment that teachers must manage and that is especially deteriorated in Euskadi, Murcia, Andalusia and Catalonia, according to the report.
“These data point to a growing complexity that requires an increasingly prepared teachers to address the difficulty of managing classrooms, something that could be increasing their frustration and discomfort,” concludes the text.
In addition, they face the challenges in class every day with their own means as the only tools, given “the structural absence of individualized reinforcement programs”, a must of the system that “limits the teaching staff to learning difficulties”. Again, it is a statement sustained by statistics: the proportion of centers that offer additional mathematics classes in Spain (whether they are reinforcement or improvement) is 30.7%, far from 65.6% on the EU-27 average, a must of which no community is fought, with Navarra, Galicia and Castilla-La Mancha at the tail.
Working conditions in backward?
From outside the sector the working conditions of teachers have traditionally seen themselves as an element in favor of the profession. Reasonable salaries, especially in high school, or the famous summer vacations were drawn in much of the collective imaginary as a plus for teachers. A detailed analysis relativizes those supposed advantages.
According to the INE, the teachers wins, on average, a little less than the rest of the workers with tertiary studies, with details: the secondary schools are a little above, the elementary schools a little below. The 2008 crisis was a blow to teaching salaries – as in so many other sectors – today almost recovered, but despite everything, it has resulted in that “the accumulated price increase makes the real salary barely grown in the last 15 years,” according to ESADE. The little growth space offered by the work career these days – do not think about dozens of euros per month for each accumulated triennium, without incentives for good performance – also does not help make the profession more attractive.
The annual number of Spanish teachers work is similar to that of other OECD countries, but since the summer break is longer among teachers “a perception of asphyxiation on a day -to -day basis”
The report has also analyzed the hourly load, and concludes that the Spanish system stresses teachers. The annual number of hours of work is similar to that of other OECD countries, but since the summer break is longer than in other systems among teachers “a perception of asphyxiation on a day -to -day basis.” The growing bureaucracy imposed by each law does not help.
Right now the Ministry of Education has opened The negotiation of the teaching statute With the unions. This document, if it becomes a reality (it is not the first time that a socialist ministry tries, it would not be the first to fail), it must regulate (improve?) Precisely all these working conditions and develop a work career that allows teachers to have objectives that go beyond accumulating years in the system to earn a little more money.
Gortázar sees complex that comes to fruition, without necessarily looking for concrete guilty. “The general context is not good for negotiation,” he says. “There is a minority government, with partners who have non -necessarily national interests, and the decision -impacting then impacts the autonomous communities [que tienen las competencias en educación]they are mostly governed by the opposition, ”he argues. And all that if previously education manages to agree with five unions with different interests.
The proposals
The cocktail of a worst situation in the classrooms, working conditions that have not collapsed but surely have not improved in the last five years, and above all a growing complexity in the classrooms together with the absence of public policies is translated, the report concludes, in a “growing tiredness and disaffection between the teaching profession”.
To reverse this situation, ESADA proposes four lines of action in order to improve both the attraction of people with a high profile to the profession and the performance of those who are already and those who will arrive.
The first proposal is to develop an annual socio -emotional support and individualized reinforcement program in mathematics and reading for low -performance and more vulnerable students. With nuances, remind the proposal that the Government launched as a result of the results of PISA and Timms, a program that should have started this course, but that nothing is known.
Guarantee greater stability of the cloisters in educational centers is considered an essential measure to “improve their functioning and learning students and improve the working conditions of children’s and primary teachers”. Soma is in that the centers with more vulnerable students are those with a higher teaching temporality rate. And with high teaching rotation it is difficult to establish a center project, Gortázar explains.
Formation is another of the lines on which to act. Here interventions are different from the stage: the primary needs, according to the analysis of ESADE, “raise the prestige and attraction of the degree of teaching”, which goes through the cutting note by reducing the offer of university places. For high school, Gortázar believes, priority must be to improve the initial pedagogical training of teachers. For both cases, it is proposed to establish a MIR “that increases the demand from the entry into the profession in exchange for more attractive conditions.”
Finally, Estade is committed to implementing an incentive system – perhaps voluntary in its origin – that promotes professional growth beyond accumulating years in the profession.
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