Due to the shortage of teachers in the country, teachers have to overload themselves with work and exceed their 37.5-hour working day week after week if they want to cover the basic needs of their students and give each one a minimum of personalized attention. This is the diagnosis made by the Workers’ Commissions in its report on the 2024-2025 school year, where they describe the situation as “alarming” and explain that the most pronounced gaps between teachers’ official working hours and those who would actually be required to respect the minimums (which teachers end up doing) occur in Madrid, Melilla, Castilla la Mancha, Catalonia and Andalusia.
“It is obvious that the 30 hours of stay [en el centro educativo] plus the 7 and a half hours of free time are in no way sufficient to assume the minimum tasks that each teacher must perform,” they say from CCOO. The union has measured how much more teachers must work to assume these tasks of individualized dedication and concludes that to achieve this “minimum” (10 minutes of attention per student per week), primary school teachers would have to dedicate, on average, almost a quarter of their time per day (8.84 hours) to this type of specific attention per week and those in secondary school more than a quarter (14.7 hours). But their schedules do not include this load, so that teachers invariably end up working more than the official 37.5 hours of their day to reserve time for corrections, adaptations, etc.
The hours allocated to administration would skyrocket if instead of these ten minutes, teachers aspired to dedicate 12 or 15 to each student every five days of classes. “We have verified that in all the proposed scenarios, the actual duration of work is much higher than the official working day,” they point out. “Taking into account that only this minimum was taken into account, the data is very alarming, because we see that teachers far exceed the official established schedule and are clearly overloaded.”
Union officials explained at a press conference that due to the shortage of teachers that exists in contrast to the high number of students that each teacher must attend to, the 7.5 additional hours included in their day are not enough for all the tasks. . the essential ones that are asked of them. According to the CCOO’s calculations, they work, in an estimated and “low” way, almost six and a half hours more per week in primary school, according to the state average, and more than eight and a half hours in secondary school. This means about 30 additional hours at the end of the month. This is the equivalent of giving the administrations almost a week of work per month.
The solutions, “urgent and inevitable”, consist of increasing the teaching staff and reducing the ratios of students per group, “but maintaining and increasing the number of teachers for each new group that results from this reduction in the ratio”. They also require a reduction in the bureaucratic burden on teachers.
The increase in staff needed to improve the sector’s “real” hours is enormous in all the autonomous communities, especially in Andalusia, Madrid, Catalonia and the Valencian Community, where, according to data from the confederation, the range is between 10,000 and the 37,500 teachers required. It would also require 4,000 to 6,900 in communities such as Castilla y León, Murcia, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Galicia and Castilla-La Mancha, and 350 to 2,500 in Ceuta, Melilla, La Rioja, Cantabria, Navarra, Asturias, Aragon. , Extremadura and Euskadi.
If a doctor is going to operate on me, I don’t want him to operate for 24 hours straight.
Hector Adsuar
— Secretary of Non-University Public Education of CCOO.
The conditions in which teachers carry out their work are fundamental for their quality of life and health, especially their mental health and to reduce their psychosocial risks, but they are especially fundamental for the quality and improvement of the education system, according to the CCOO. “In any profession, not arriving influences quality. If a doctor has to operate on me, I don’t want him to have operated for 24 hours straight. On the other hand, the feeling of wanting to do everything but not being able to do it is not easy to manage. We must develop resilience because we have no other choice,” explained Héctor Adsuar, Secretary of Non-University Public Education at the CCOO, who added: “In addition, the resources to face these difficult situations are not something they give you, but something that you ‘have to look for yourself’.”
To find solutions to the obvious overload that teachers suffer, they say, the first step is to assess the situation as much as possible and objectively, to highlight the situation and find appropriate solutions. That is why they also wanted to define and specify how many students each teacher serves on average in the different educational stages. “We have always talked about it, but speaking of students per class, and we wanted to ask: how many students do I have to serve as a teacher,” Adsuar said.
More than 100 students per teacher in Madrid or Melilla
According to the data obtained, each teacher has an average of 53.06 students in primary schools and around 88.21 in secondary schools, with Euskadi having the lowest figures (39.19 in primary schools and 64.55 in secondary schools) and Madrid the lowest (64.08 and 112.94). The most worrying cases occur in high schools, where communities such as Madrid, Andalusia, Ceuta, Melilla, Castilla la Mancha, Catalonia or Murcia have an average of 100 students per teacher or more.
These data were obtained by calculating the average number of groups taught by each teacher, both in preschool and primary education centers (CEIP) and in secondary education institutes (IES), and then this figure was multiplied by the average number of students per group. In the CEIP, a weighted average was made of the courses taught in these preschool and primary centers, and in the IES, a weighted average was also made including all the courses taught: ESO, Baccalaureate and the various vocational training diplomas.
The union reminds us that these are averages, which as such serve to give an approximate idea of the sector, but at the same time they are not a faithful representation of the reality of many teachers. Those who work in small or medium-sized towns and in rural schools will probably have fewer students to serve; in large cities, or specialists in minority subjects who teach more groups to fill their timetable, have more.
18% more time than necessary
The report also reviews the situation of temporary employment in the teaching sector of public education, which currently stands at 26%, very far from the objective (an obligation that comes from Europe) of 8%. The reasons for this situation, they explain, are that the replacement of recent years has not been carried out in most territories, that the stabilization offers were not sufficient in many communities and that no newly created places have been offered since 2020.
To solve this situation, they say, an extraordinary call for more than 100,000 places is necessary. They assure that it is possible to do it immediately since “the General State Budgets establish that the replacement rate can be exceeded with the objective of not exceeding 8% temporary.” But to achieve this, they insist, “it is necessary for the administrations to recognize the problem, realize that they have teachers and be willing to solve their mistakes. “It cannot continue like this.”
