The freezing of posts in the teacher transfer competition: when the Staffing Decree serves private interests

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From the systematic freezing of vacant posts sharp practice in the use of the points system: the rift between school stability and the private interests of headteachers.

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Xabier Ferrer Meseguer

Around this time of year, as autumn begins, one of the least-known, most opaque yet most consequential bureaucratic rituals in the public education system gets under way. Each Territorial Service, acting under the Department of Education’s guidelines, asks school headteachers—not senior leadership teams—to indicate which vacant posts should be advertised in the public teacher transfer competition. What follows is a kind of tug-of-war: headteachers ask whether some posts can be kept back for another couple of school years or whether the staffing list can be altered so that, instead of post ‘X’, post ‘Y’ is advertised. This is therefore a preliminary stage of the Concurs General de Trasllats (general teacher transfer competition). The decisions made at this stage are governed by Decree 39/2014 of 25 March, on improving the management of teaching staff allocations, commonly known as the Decret de Plantilles (Staffing Decree). The decree leaves these decisions entirely in the hands of the headteacher in post, and this is where one of the most serious and overlooked distortions of our public service occurs.

For more than a decade, coinciding with a massive wave of retirements among the baby-boom generation, we have witnessed a curious and deeply worrying phenomenon: vacant posts are systematically frozen, while year after year they are filled by teachers on provisional postings (PP), teachers on temporary secondment (CS) or interim teachers. Citing supposed needs linked to a ‘school’s own educational project’, ‘specific staff profiles’ that cannot be accommodated within a conventional subject specialism, or ‘pedagogical continuity’, many headteachers have chosen to withdraw posts from the Concurs de Trasllats (teacher transfer competition) that, by any standard of transparent management, should have been open to the entire teaching workforce.

However, the current situation has pushed this clientelist model to breaking point. Following the extraordinary employment stabilisation processes—through merit-based selection and large-scale competitive examinations arising from Law 20/2021— thousands of newly appointed career civil servants have secured their status on paper but, in practice, still have no permanent posting. They are thus trapped in chronic job insecurity, perhaps without even realising it. In some cases, they are condemned to travel hundreds of kilometres every week, face uncertainty about their family lives and depend, year after year, on the goodwill of the headteacher in post, who has sole discretion to decide whether or not they can remain at the school.

At this point, we need to focus on one of the system’s most obvious blind spots: the clear conflict of interest inherent in the management of staffing, which we cannot ignore, however uncomfortable the reality may be. It can—and does—happen in headteachers’ offices. Consider a scenario that may well be familiar: a teacher becomes headteacher of a school where they do not have a permanent posting. As the person ultimately responsible for the school’s staffing, the headteacher has the legal power to propose which posts are blocked and which are advertised. For years, while automatically accumulating points through teaching experience and their time in a leadership role, among other things, the post they occupy and want to secure permanently remains conveniently frozen. No one from outside can apply for it because, quite simply, a post that is not advertised cannot be awarded.

But then comes the miracle. After a few years, the headteacher quietly works out their points score, realising that their total is approaching a level almost impossible for anyone else to match—say, 180 or 220 points accumulated through teaching experience and the position they hold. Suddenly, the post that has been frozen for so long is magically ‘unfrozen’ and advertised in the Concurs de Trasllats. If no one has more points, the outcome is obviously tailor-made for the headteacher: a sham competition in which the appointment is a foregone conclusion before the envelopes are even opened. The Administration simply looks on, turning a blind eye as a public procedure is manipulated for private gain. This once again distorts and instrumentalises the Decret de Plantilles. And what are the consequences? In subjects with few teachers (French, classical languages, technology and so on), getting a post at that school can become impossible for good.

This trend is not confined to school leadership teams; it has also fostered a culture of ‘tactical manoeuvring’ and sharp practice among certain sections of the teaching profession. Some teachers systematically avoid applying for permanent posts in schools serving particularly disadvantaged communities or in geographically peripheral schools, preferring the convenience of a secondment or a temporary post while waiting for the right combination of points and timing to secure their dream job close to home. Once again, this creates a web of personal connections and misplaced loyalties that undermines the principles of equality, merit and ability that should govern access to public service.

As long as the education authorities continue to hide behind a false notion of school autonomy and delegate absolute power to headteachers without any checks and balances, the Concurs de Trasllats will remain a bureaucratic fiction in which those who play by the rules often end up getting burned. The education authorities cannot keep proclaiming their commitment to the ‘quality of public education’, ‘staff retention’ and staff wellbeing while thousands of teachers are sent on an absurd geographical pilgrimage, largely to protect the interests and personal timetables of a privileged few.

The solution, then, inevitably requires a bold and far-reaching review of the Decret de Plantilles to restore transparency in schools, establish external oversight of the freezing of vacancies and ensure that all posts—ordinary, profiled or structural posts created ad hoc—are automatically advertised. There is little point in passing stabilisation laws in the BOE if, in everyday school life, headteachers’ offices continue to operate like private estates.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons