New teacher recruitment regime approved by the Council of Ministers – Society

The Council of Ministers approved this Thursday the new teacher management and recruitment regime, which was being negotiated between the Ministry of Education and sector unions for more than five months.

In a statement, the Council of Ministers states that the changes to the regime for hiring and placing teachers in basic and secondary education and specialized technicians for training serve the objectives of “approaching, fixing and binding” professionals.

The priorities – adds the Government – are “combating precariousness, reinforced stability in career access, direct linkage within a grouping framework or school framework”.

On the other hand, the new regime also reorganizes the staff in the pedagogical zone, which went from 10 to 63, thus reducing the geographical areas “while responding to the needs of the system at a time of shortage of teachers”, reads the communicated.

The decree-law approved this Thursday was presented to the trade union organizations a week ago in a supplementary meeting to the negotiation process that started in September and which ended with no agreement from any of the 12 organizations.

At the end of the meeting, the Minister of Education, João Costa, made a positive assessment of the negotiation process, stressing that the final proposal reflects several concessions by the Government.

Regarding the initial proposal, presented in September, the executive did not give up on some measures, such as the possibility of teachers with incomplete hours teaching in two schools and the creation of councils composed of school directors from each pedagogical zone staff to do this management.

In other matters, on the other hand, he approached union claims. This is the case of the criteria for dynamic binding, the conditions for salary progression of contracted teachers, the reduction in the geographical area of ​​staff in the pedagogical zone, as well as direct hiring by schools, which, from the beginning, deserved strong opposition from the organizations.

On the part of teachers, union organizations justified the lack of agreement by stating that the final proposal maintains red lines that had already been identified in previous meetings.

Under the new regime, around 10,000 teachers will be hired later this year and a model of dynamic binding will be created in addition to the brake norm, with the annual opening of vacancies. For hired teachers, two new pay scales are created.

It is planned to open 20,000 vacancies in school staff in 2024, in order to fix 90% of linked teachers in school staff, keeping only 10% in the pedagogical zone staff, to meet temporary needs.