Forty-one Early Childhood and Primary Education centers in Segrià will not schedule camps, outings, or complementary activities for the next school year. The decision has already been communicated to the territorial services of the Department of Education in Lleida.
The measure affects activities that are a regular part of school life, but the teaching teams maintain that staffing and resources do not allow them to be maintained under current conditions. At the same time, they emphasize that they do not question their pedagogical usefulness, but rather link the suspension to a lack of professionals, excessive ratios, and the overload that teachers assume outside of class hours.
The 41 centers also suspend tutoring and meetings outside of class hours
In addition to camps and outings, the centers will stop conducting internships, training, festivals, tutoring, and back-to-school meetings outside of class hours. The cutback therefore extends to a large part of the tasks that have so far been assumed as complementary to the ordinary workday.
The teaching staff denounces the responsibility and workload they voluntarily assume on excursions and other external activities. The protest also calls for improvements for educational support staff and for the center's labor staff.
In the joint statement, the Early Childhood and Primary centers of Segrià specify that it is not a renunciation of the pedagogical value of these activities. The decision, they add, is a response to working conditions that they consider insufficient to sustain them.
Teachers link the protest to high ratios and lack of inclusive resources
Among the reasons given are the lack of professionals, excessive ratios in classrooms, scarcity of resources for inclusive education, bureaucracy, and lack of labor and social recognition. The centers present this set of factors as the origin of a burden that has ended up being transferred to voluntary activities and tasks outside of class hours.
"To guarantee educational quality in the long term, it is essential that the system has adequate support" - Early Childhood and Primary Education Centers of Segrià
The communication sent to the Department of Education in Lleida presents the suspension as a temporary measure. The centers maintain that the objective is not to eliminate complementary activities permanently, but to force a response regarding staffing, resources, and working conditions.
In fact, the teaching collective sets a specific condition to reverse it. The Early Childhood and Primary Education centers in Segrià state that the measure is provisional and will be repealed when their demands are met.