About 80 secondary school master’s students from the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) have signed a letter addressed to the Department of Education in which they ask to be able to validate their internships or at least part of them because they have been teaching in institutes for several years .
They resort to the lack of teachers in specialties that are difficult to cover, such as Catalan or IT, in which there are no longer professionals on the job market. They argue that if next year they are forced to leave their jobs to do the 250 hours of practice, the problem will get worse. In the letter they say that practicing already guarantees the practical competence sought by the master’s degree. They claim that some specialties are in such short supply, such as computer science in vocational training courses (VET), that they have authorized higher (non-university) graduates to replace teacher leave.
The letter has also been sent to the Department of Universities and the management of the UOC, who are also involved.
The internships for the master’s in ESO Teacher Training, baccalaureate, professional training and language teaching, a qualifying and mandatory master’s degree, last two to three months. During this time, teachers who are already working would leave the workplace and would not receive any income.
Really, the fact that secondary school teachers practice without the relevant master’s degree is already an anomaly. Following the lack of substitutes, in 2019 the department exceptionally authorized the entry of university graduates into the labor market in exchange for a commitment to train for a maximum of three years.
Five years have passed and there are still some who have not enrolled in the master’s degree, so last week Education announced that they will be notified that they are at least pre-registered in a master’s degree if they want to continue working. And that there are empty places after the UOC expanded.
Regarding the request of these students, they consider it a matter of university regulations.
The UOC, which offers six specialties of this master’s degree from 2023, confirms to this newspaper that the internships are mandatory, face-to-face and can only be done in training centers recognized by the department (the center where they already work does not work).
Likewise, since it is a regulated master’s degree, it conforms to state legislation and is organized in accordance with the framework of the Catalan university system. In this sense, campuses cannot fully validate internships because they already have teaching experience, according to a 2011 agreement of the commission for the regulation of monitoring and accreditation of state university degrees. “The UOC does not establish the conditions for the validation of internships”, says the university. “It is governed by the established regulation”.
“At the UOC – continue sources from the entity – we are aware of the problems that affect these professionals and we are at the disposal of the Government and the affected students in case we can contribute to mitigating the effects, always within the current legislation”.
In other years, the Administration would have detected that hired substitute teachers requested medical leave to complete their master’s internships. But, from January 2024, this is not possible due to the obligation to register trainees with Social Security.
This is not the case for the professionals and master’s students who urge the Government in this letter for flexibility that suits all parties.
