Meetings have been going on all morning; FENPROF seen first
The National Federation of Teachers emerged from today’s meeting with the ministry of education decrying the whole episode as “a missed opportunity”.
Although a dozen unions are having meetings with the Secretary of State for Administration and Educational Innovation, Pedro Dantas da Cunha this morning, FENPROF’s immediate ‘thumbs down’ will not have helped them along.
The federation has accused the ministry of a “lack of ambition in reviewing the various diplomas that affect teachers’ lives”.
“As we predicted, it was confirmed”, said the organisation led by Mário Nogueira. “The review of these diplomas ends up being a missed opportunity for the Ministry of Education”.
Twelve union structures were called to the ministry today to continue negotiating the review of diplomas that define matters as varied as the value to be attributed to teachers who agree to be mentors of future teachers, conditions under which future teachers will do their internships and the recruitment and service time recovery regimes.
Regarding the ongoing training of teachers, Mário Nogueira believes the department “could have the ambition to go further”.
“The ongoing training regime today is more focused on the sum of training hours than on teacher qualifications and training quality. There should have been more changes,” he lamented.
Also in the diploma on the recovery of service time, the ministry “could have gone further”, resolving the situation of teachers who “also suffered from the freeze” but “were left out”.
This ‘freeze’ refers to the government’s treatment of salaries, recently corrected, but not, in the eyes of FENPROF, corrected sufficiently.
Regarding internships and internship supervisors, “the ministry has not changed a single thing from what was presented in the previous meeting,” Nogueira went on.
Union members consider that additional pay to be given to cooperating supervisors is very low (less than €90) and refuse to depend on authorisation from the school to be able to reduce their working hours to support interns.
The negotiation process “was not concluded today”, railed Nogueira.
Throughout the morning, the unions have been meeting with Pedro Dantas da Cunha, against the backdrop of a rally and plenary session scheduled for 10:30 in defense of single-teacher teachers. This activity, by S.T.O.P. (the syndicate of all workers in education), will almost certainly have implied more classes being ‘missed’ in parts of the country due to the teachers’ taking part being absent from their workplaces – a situation that has left thousands of parents frustrated this year as every Friday appears to be a day of strikes of one form or other in the nation’s public schools.
Source material: LUSA
