For many years, major private education centers offering professional training cycles, such as Ilerna and IFP (Grupo Planeta), have kept teachers on non-categorical professional contracts and subjected them to poorer working conditions. According to EL PAÍS y SER Catalunya, the largest company in the sector, Ilerna, where 66% of Catalonia’s distance learning students are concentrated, began a regularization process in September this year, starting with a contract for a private education consultant and several complaints filed with the Labor Inspectorate by the UGT union and several temporary employees. The same path is followed by the IFP, but this time involving professors from the field centers behind the CGT prison and workers’ organizations through workshop agreements and secondments. Other big players in the space, such as Ceac (absorbed by Planeta) and Medac, also have good deals.
The private FP sector has grown like a bubble over the past decade, driven not only by interest in this type of research but also by the lack of public space. According to Ministry of Education data, distance education led the most active growth, with 66,270 places accumulated for courses in 2022-2023, while the figure for face-to-face private classes tripled. Catalonia is the undisputed leading community in remote private FP, with the bulk of its business concentrated in Lleida-based Ilerna, which enrolls approximately 44,000 students in the same courses, far exceeding its closest competitors such as IPF del Grupo Planeta (5,000 students) and Catalunya Center d’Estudis (2,300). The problem is that the explosion in this sector is occurring without thorough control on the part of the ministry. The Ministry approved a decree regulating the sector in 2021, which was suspended following a request from Ilerna, but the Ministry of Education has been working on new regulations for a year, which will restore the spirit of the original regulations and will soon abolish public information.
According to a survey by EL PAÍS y SER Catalunya, students at private FP centers blamed various deficiencies, including the lack of places to practice and the lack of preparation of some teachers. Currently, some teachers in these centers blame poor working conditions on a lack of agreement. In the case of Ilerna, the branch teachers online They always work under the marketing and consulting department, and this situation was reported to the Labor Inspectorate in April by the UGT union on the one hand and in July by a group of additional workers on the other hand.
This course was driven by Ilerna. In early September, I made a surprise announcement to workers about changes to the agreement for educational centers without concert restrictions. “Before entering the corporate stage, they sent us a new contract and forced us to sign within 24 hours. We were all told to sign or it was not applicable,” explains one of several consulting teachers who requested anonymity. Since Ilerna, they have explained in a document that the changes to the agreement were “in response to the demands” of the workers to “normalize the situation in the factory in accordance with the agreement corresponding to the activities of teachers.” The company said this was a “concerning matter” and was currently “due to corporate restructuring.” In 2024, Ilerna was acquired by Swiss investment fund Jacobs Holding.
The change involved little in the way of pay, with Ilerna paying a supplement to bring her salary in line with her teacher’s salary, but only changing the number of hours she worked per year from 1,780 to 1,376. Teachers may feel at ease if they have less time but “the same amount of work,” but this certainly means that the quality of their attention will be lower. “The same volume needs to be fixed in a shorter amount of time, so it gets fixed in a more superficial way,” he adds. In this passage, the teachers consulted charged that each teacher could serve up to 2,000 students and said: “Imagine the quality of education. There is no such thing as personalized learning.”
This is not useful in situations where the exam is conducted in person in a large space such as a hotel. This is because students and teachers from all over Spain have to travel to conduct the exams. Teachers acknowledge their limitations in monitoring students. “During the exam, the teacher is solving questions and competing. email…I have to use my phone all the time because sometimes I check exams for other assignments, so if students have any questions, they have to write and reply to the teacher in chat at any time. ” There are many opinions.
Teachers claim they feel unprotected due to a lack of staff cohesion within the union wing of the current company board. “Many difficulties arise because companies do not make it easy to elect internal committees, and workers also want to be fired out of fear,” explains Santi Balcells, director of public services at UGT in Lleida.
In the case of IFP, it is an FP training center established by training instructor Grupo Planeta. online They are autonomous and, as the union wing of the CGT has denounced, the problem centers on face-to-face teaching with workshop agreements and secondments. “Several workers went to management to complain about the appropriate agreement and a last resort was set up in the union department. The company, seeing that the workers were becoming more uneasy and organized, began negotiations,” a union representative explains. Planet didn’t want to make a declaration.
These same sources say that from now until the end of the year, the company has secured an agreement for the gradual redeployment of a total of around 82 teachers from the centers of Barcelona and L’Hospitalet to all workers, based on appropriate agreements, union figures show. “For 10 years I failed to comply with regulations and lost 500,000 euros in salary,” he added. However, they admitted that they did not file a complaint with the Labor Inspection Office.
However, this type of case may go unnoticed by the inspector. Education inspection officials have confirmed that when they visit education centers, they check whether teachers have the necessary titles, provided that appropriate agreements are in place. Trabajo, on the other hand, assures that the inspections do not intend to sanction companies that do not apply the appropriate agreements, but that they can only issue warnings if they compromise the working conditions of workers.
online teachers association
The rapid growth of this field has also led to the discovery of regulations regarding the role of teachers onlinewhich represents the most specific characteristics of a tutoring contract. With the aim of protecting this group, the Amploe Association was founded this summer by several extra Bahadores from Ilerna. The group has created a guide to help people understand their rights, where telework and distance between teachers often create barriers to building working relationships and promoting the establishment of union sectors. They also met with the Ministry of Education to request common regulations. “We accept students from different locations and follow the regulations of each community. We are seeking minimum state regulations detailing the proportion of students and the conditions for taking the exam,” explains Pablo Díaz, the association’s president.
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