Disaster

I would like to talk about the system in Spain for the selection of teachers. It is called Oposiciones and it is used to decide who is a good teacher and give him a job forever.



Firstly I would like to point out that the tribunal is formed by teachers that can have less experience that the people they are testing. A person with four years of experience can test another with twenty! I have found really good teachers tested by his olds students!



Secondly, the tribunal mostly doesn’t know the topics better than the opositores that they are testing. They have those topics over the table and they have to check it all the time. Those topics mostly have being made by private academies where the people go to prepare the oposiciones and to study it. I suppose some remember a little but nothing else.



Third. It is compulsory write down a bibliography even when the topics has been made by a private organization and there is nothing made by the students (remembering that the students can be teachers with a lot of experience, with family, kids and obligations). You have to learn the name of the books by heart when practically nobody has read those books in the oposiciones.



In primary, you have to learn 25 topics by heart and then memorize a program and talk about it for 30 minutes. You have to memorize then a didactic unit with activities and say that in front of the tribunal like a parrot during 45 minutes. Those activities are prepared in advance so the private academy or anybody else can do it and the student only needs to memorize it.



All this process happens every two years and there are teachers that have been doing that for more than twenty years. The system changes sometimes and the topics too.



Remembering that tribunal and people that is studying oposiciones studied at the university the exactly same degree and probably a lot of the teachers that want to pass the oposiciones are much better prepared than the tribunal and with much more degrees and experience but they have family, kids, much more things to think about than a 23 years student and of course they can not study 5,6,7 hours per day. With that system the best teachers have the door closed.



I have friends in different countries. They don’t want to go back to Spain because they are 40 or more years old and they have no time to study such a hard and nosense exam that doesn’t show they real skillfulness. In Spain people doesn’t speak English and the level of English of the teachers in the Primaries schools can be terrible but the system can reject real bilingual ones



In fact people living in London for example and with a terrific level of English can be tested by teachers that practically never went abroad or only in summers ….and they don´t understand what they are talking about.I don’t know if I should smile or cry…



Teachers that have to study oposiciones can stay without any permanent job for the rest of their lifes. They are hired for two years and then they are fired to be hired again (or not) depending on the oposiciones. In that way they never adquire any right



This is the shameful system in Spain. One of the worst educative systems on the developed world and one of the systems with more failures in Europe

If you have any doubt or have any question write me to