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The reopening of schools in most Italian regions is scheduled for next week, but among the many problems in organizing coexistence with the coronavirus epidemic, a scenario is emerging in which at least in the coming months dozens of Thousands of places for full professors will be left vacant and will therefore be filled by precarious professors with substitute contracts.
For weeks, the government has been adopting extraordinary plans to hire a large number of teachers, but according to the first available information and the opinions of the unions, they are not working and they will not work. This is because the way in which the system of assigning chairs in Italy is structured has enormous previous problems, which have not been solved with the extraordinary measures decided by the government.
According to an estimate by the Teachers ‘Guild, the teachers’ union, the vacancies total between 170 and 180 thousand: they are permanent permanent positions, which are not assigned and are filled with substitutes. Their number was very high even before the epidemic, and it has been increased by new retirements and by the requests that come from teachers over 55 years of age and with previous pathologies who have decided to take advantage of the possibility of not participating in face-to-face teaching to the risk of contagion.
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The government has approved several measures to hire new full professors. At the end of August, the Ministry of Economy and Education approved the hiring of 80-85 thousand permanent teachers, but the assignments of the chairs -which have already been concluded- covered only a small part: there are no official figures but the estimates speak of a third of the total.
It may seem contradictory, given the number of precarious teachers and recent graduates who would like to teach: but the problem is in the mechanism that regulates hiring. In fact, they are based on two types of rankings, half on those defined as “until exhaustion” and the other half on those of “competition”. The former are rankings that have been closed for more than ten years, prepared on a provincial basis, while the latter are those that include the winners of the latest contests.
The problem is that for different classes of competence – the problem especially concerns the Center and the North, in particular subjects such as mathematics, Italian, languages and support – the rankings are empty: because the candidates end up in the exhausted ones and the competences . They are not filled or updated due to delays in new competitions. While waiting for the new national competition -which seems to be scheduled for autumn- in many subjects, therefore, there are no teachers with the necessary qualifications to be hired.
The Ministry of Education tried to address the problem with two measures: a “quick call” with which it offered the possibility of being hired in a province of its choice outside of its region, and an extraordinary hiring of 50,000 teachers. – in addition to 20,000 school staff members – due to the epidemic. But the “quick call”, made in recent days, seems to have gotten very few subscriptions: even “a few hundred” according to the Corriere della Sera. Hiring through this procedure involved the obligation to stay in their assigned place for five years, which seems to have discouraged many teachers along with salaries that many consider too low. Milan Mayor Beppe Sala spoke of an “absolute fiasco”, calling the number of teachers who agreed to move to Lombardy “ridiculous” and judging that the proposed salary was insufficient compared to the cost of living in the city.
According to the newspapers, then, there are also long delays with extraordinary hiring, unattractive for contracts that provide for dismissal without compensation in case of suspension of lessons for a emergency shutdown.
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The biggest gaps refer to middle and high schools, and especially in northern Italy. Between Lombardy and Veneto there are more than 20 thousand permanent positions that will remain empty and will be filled by substitutes, according to the Sole 24 Mineral. “This will also be a year dedicated to precarious teachers, with the aggravation that in the absence of competitions or other stabilization mechanisms, new precarious workers are added to the previous year,” said Rino Di Meglio, national coordinator of the Guild. of teachers. It is estimated that in the next school year a total of 250 thousand substitutes will be needed.
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