Is the Decret de Plantilles (Staffing Decree 39/2014) beginning to crumble?

The evolution of the profiling of teaching posts, greater job security for teachers, and an impending paradigm shift in Catalonia’s school staffrooms. / Image: AI-generated.

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Xabier Ferrer Meseguer

The balance of power in Catalan school staffrooms is changing irreversibly. A system of obedience built over more than a decade around the profiling of teaching posts and employment insecurity will soon face an unforeseen obstacle: the appointment of thousands of teachers as permanent civil servants.

As the fear of non-renewal diminishes, the managerial model established by the Staffing Decree is finally beginning to crumble at its very foundations.

The net is closing in—and more than many realise. In 2010, a visit from a union representative alerted us to the dangers of the Staffing Decree, as if he were predicting the apocalypse. He assured us that many posts would not be advertised in open competition. Many of us did not believe him, reasoning that, since we were civil servants employed by Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (MECD) rather than by the Generalitat, the Catalan government, his warning could not become reality. We were wrong. I began to understand this some time later, when the headteacher asked me to tailor the profile of a teaching post to a particular teacher he wanted to keep at the school. Fifteen years on, she is still there.

When the Staffing Decree, implementing the Llei d’Educació de Catalunya (Catalan Education Act, LEC), was approved in 2014, the official narrative was wrapped in an aura of modernity and school autonomy. On the face of it, everything sounded very good and even made sense. On the front line of the classroom, however, it became an instrument of absolute power. For the first time, the principles of equality, merit and ability underpinning the general teacher transfer procedure were subordinated to the headteacher’s discretion.

This discretion, exercised with complete impunity for years, has opened up a serious crack in the public-service system. How is it possible, in a democratic system, for a teacher with a score of 100,000 to be ranked ahead of another with 7,000 in the same subject area? Under the guise of technical specialisation, post profiling has too often been used to tailor a job to a particular individual. While many headteachers have acted honestly, others have crossed red lines by appointing relatives, friends or partners to their staff, while the education Inspectorate looked on passively.

As if that were not enough, reserving posts for those with specific profiles has ‘frozen’ vacancies that should have been advertised in open competition. This has prevented teachers with years of service from moving to other posts and created a degree of instability that has made it impossible to develop long-term educational projects.

This dynamic spilled over into everyday working life. Under the authority of the decree, participation in exhausting projects or the organisation of trips became an implicit condition for being ‘recommended’ in June. A sham social peace was thus constructed—not through consensus, but through the vulnerability of staff in precarious employment, who ultimately accepted the decree too, because it allowed them to keep their jobs, even when their scores might have been higher than those of other teachers.

The real earthquake, however, has not come from legislative reform, but from the extraordinary stabilisation processes. The large-scale process of granting permanent status to temporary teachers has exposed monumental hypocrisy: many of those who had staunchly defended the decree to protect their jobs have now secured permanent civil-service status, changed their tune and transferred to another school at the first opportunity offered by the teacher transfer procedure. What has become of those famous ‘school-specific priorities? They were a theoretical construct designed to justify control, and they are now collapsing as teachers regain their freedom in the workplace.

So, what are we seeing now—and what can we expect from the next school year onwards? The answer is straightforward: when a teacher knows their job is secure, and that the worst that can happen if they stand up to an imposed decision is that they have to apply for a transfer, the headteacher’s power to exert pressure collapses. The Staffing Decree remains on the books in the Diari Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya (DOGC, the Official Gazette of the Government of Catalonia), but it has, inevitably, suffered a mortal blow. As Lluís Llach sang in L’estaca, perhaps it has not been brought down by institutional action, but the ground on which it stood has changed for good. In Catalonia’s state education system, the reign of obedience through fear is over.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons