Staffing in schools: an unresolved challenge in Catalonia’s education system

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Jesús Moral Castrillo

Managing staff in schools remains one of the most sensitive issues in Catalonia’s education system. Every primary and secondary schools must strike a careful balance when determining which posts it needs, which specialisms are essential, and how stable its teams should be. This process, which may look merely technical, has direct consequences for equity, team cohesion and the quality of learning.

The Legacy of Decree 39/2014

When the Department of Education introduced Decree 39/2014, it argued that schools needed greater autonomy to shape their teams and consolidate stable, coherent whole-school projects. Yet the decree opened a deep rift within the educational community—one that has never fully healed.

Trade unions and many teachers warned that the new system invited subjective criteria in staff selection, with a real risk of undermining equal opportunities and eroding labour rights. A number of school leaders, by contrast, insisted that flexibility was indispensable if schools were to respond to their particular challenges. The result was a fragile balance between autonomy and oversight, between trust and arbitrariness. With no shared agreement, progress towards a more modern, fair and efficient model has proved difficult.

A new model for a new reality

Ten years on, the educational landscape has changed dramatically. Schools now face growing cultural, linguistic and socio-economic diversity, as well as increasing pedagogical complexity—pressures that require staffing structures that are flexible yet also stable. The current model does not rise to this challenge: allocation criteria often fail to reflect the real complexity of schools, and recruitment procedures continue to generate a sense of opacity and mistrust.

A thorough reform is therefore needed—one that guarantees an objective and transparent allocation of human resources, strengthens educational equity by recognising the diversity of contexts, protects labour rights, and reconciles the role of school leaders with a robust, rights-based system of safeguards.

The task, ultimately, is to find a workable equilibrium between autonomy and equality of opportunity.

Calculation, recruitment and transparency

A crucial step is to distinguish clearly between the model for calculating staffing levels—both core and additional—and the model for filling posts. Treating these separately allows each issue to be addressed at an appropriate pace and with the right tools, avoiding bottlenecks and encouraging smarter management.

Updating the staffing-calculation system is essential. It should rely on objective, publicly available indicators such as a school’s complexity index, the proportion of pupils with specific needs, optimal pupil–teacher ratios at each stage, local socio-economic conditions, and the level of managerial difficulty. These parameters should determine the allocation not only of teaching staff but also of support personnel.

Robust, up-to-date data are indispensable if decisions are to be well-informed and long-standing inequalities between schools corrected. Algorithms cannot replace professional judgement, but they can lend coherence, transparency and legitimacy to decision-making.

As for recruitment, it is reasonable for schools to seek profiles that align with their educational projects—yet any room for arbitrariness must be removed. A new model should define procedures for specifying and filling posts that involve municipalities, inspectorate staff and union representatives, grounded in clear, public and verifiable criteria. With such a framework in place, autonomy and guarantees would no longer appear as competing principles.

Transparency and accountability are likewise essential. In a system under increasing strain, the regular publication of indicators, reports and operational data may be the most effective means of rebuilding trust within the educational community.

Dialogue, participation and legitimacy

No educational reform can succeed without broad social legitimacy. Redefining the staffing model should therefore include the creation of a permanent negotiating forum bringing together unions, the inspectorate, school leaders and experts. If genuinely operational—rather than merely symbolic—such a space could become a tool for shared governance, capable of forging consensus and ensuring the long-term sustainability of public policy.

At a time when reforms are often imposed from above, restoring a culture of agreement is a sign of institutional maturity. Dialogue remains the best guarantee that any transformation will be stable and accepted by all actors in the system.

The reform should also include continuous assessment, gradual implementation through pilot schemes and periodic review of results. This quality-assurance approach would make it possible to correct dysfunctions and adjust the criteria to changing realities without disturbing the system’s overall balance.

Towards a new institutional culture

Ultimately, the success of the reform will depend not only on its regulatory content but also on the institutional culture that accompanies it. Overhauling the staffing model offers a chance to rebuild bridges between the Administration and the educational community, restore mutual trust and place the management of teaching staff at the centre of the debate on educational quality.

The task is not simply to distribute teachers, but to distribute opportunities, recognition and resources according to principles of fairness and efficiency. Moving away from “low-cost education” and committing to a personnel policy grounded in professionalism, equity and transparency is an essential condition for improving the country’s education system.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons