The Department of Education announced yesterday that enrollment in training courses will be brought forward in July, so that no young person has to join with the course already started, as has happened in recent years. He made this announcement during the signing of the Government’s agreement with social agents on the promotion of FP which, among other issues, allows employers and unions to intervene in the planning of the FP offer.
“For the first time, every student who participates in the ordinary process will know the place they have been assigned before the course begins and will be able to start classes from the first day,” said councilor Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, who added that “no they will have to wait until mid-September, as has happened for the previous 20 courses”.
For this reason, Education has brought forward the pre-registration and shortened the deadlines for reallocating places. In middle cycles, registration will be from July 3 to 7, and July 30, in the second phase. In September, an extraordinary process will be opened, if necessary. For the higher, with a calendar closer to the university, registration will take place from July 19 to 24 and, in the second phase, from September 8.
With the new calendar, the Government wants to avoid the collapse that occurred in previous years in enrollments, exacerbated in the last 3 years by the strong pressure of demand, and which forced thousands of students to start classes in end of September or beginning of October, a month later than the start of school and others to give up or go to private school.
Safely, about 11,500 students started after September 21 after pre-registering in May. It is unknown the number of those who participated in the extraordinary call, opened on September 23 (for those who did not enter cycles or who did not pre-register in May) as well as those who gave up for fear of not having a place before the summer (20,000 people were left without an assigned place).
This year, students in 4th year of ESO, basic FP, 1st year of high school and adult schools will have an advanced pre-registration. Last year, the 4th year of ESO managed to enter in 97% of the cases.
The agreement signed yesterday by the departments of the Presidency, Work and Education with employers (Foment del Treball and Pimec) and unions (the UGT and CC.OO.) calls for a single pre-registration to apply in 2025-2026 for the set of studies (VET, high school and university included) to avoid double pre-registrations. Also reserve places in a higher grade for those who come from an average cycle and increase the cycles with more labor demand.
In addition, the agreement promotes the reorganization of the FP, with a network of integrated centers (offering educational and occupational degrees as in the other autonomous regions, but in Catalonia a decree has not been drawn up), the guarantee of ‘a bigger investment (the current budget has increased to 900 million), more dual modality, more online training and more professional guidance with a long-term strategy (another decree is also missing).
The FP Agency undertook to present a prospecting study and a four-year action plan in November.
