The Ministry of Education, Vocational Training, Physical Activity and Sports of the Government of the Canary Islands, led by Poli Suárez, has initiated the tender process for the new educational assistants contract, with a budget of 79,818,334.74 euros for the next three years.
The service is intended to provide the necessary support to students with disabilities, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), severe behavioral disorders (SBD) and special school health conditions enrolled in public educational centers in the Canary Islands. Its purpose is to meet the needs of these students during their school day and to promote their inclusion and participation in the ordinary educational system.
The contract will have a maximum duration of three years, with an investment of 26,606,111.58 euros in each of the three annual periods, corresponding to ten months of service provision in 2027, 2028 and 2029. The duration of the provision may reach a maximum of five years if the corresponding extensions are agreed upon.
The procedure will also allow for the regularization of the provision of a service whose contract has been null and void since 2021. The tender thus puts an end to a situation that has been ongoing since the last legislature and provides the service with a contractual framework for the coming years. Among the main improvements planned is the expansion of coverage, both during the school day and in other activities organized by schools. In addition, measures are being incorporated to streamline substitutions and respond to support needs that may arise throughout the course.
On this matter, Poli Suárez highlighted that "with this tender, we are responding to a situation that has been pending for too long, and we are doing so by guaranteeing the continuity of an essential service for our students and their families, with a stable framework," while emphasizing that "it not only means renewing the contract, but also taking advantage of that renewal to improve its conditions, something necessary and widely demanded, and to adapt it to the real needs of the centers."
Suárez also stressed that this is not an isolated effort. "We have worked throughout the legislature to strengthen support for students with specific educational support needs, so that this increase in investment translates into better care," said the counselor, recalling that "we have increased the number of assistants, incorporated more teachers, and we have increased resources and services so that every child has the response they need."
More hours and services
Among the main innovations of the new contract is the increase in the maximum daily stay of staff in the centers, which goes from five to 6.5 hours, which will allow for broader coverage of student needs during the school day.
Added to this is the inclusion of attention during the school lunch service, which until now was not included in the contract, as well as the provision of support in school residences that cater to students with special educational needs.
At the same time, the new contract strengthens complementary and extracurricular activities, so that professionals can accompany students who require this support in activities organized by the centers themselves, including those that take place outside of school hours or require overnight stays, such as camps, get-togethers, or study trips. With this improvement, the aim is that the need for assistance does not limit student participation in these types of activities, thus allowing them to take part in them under the same conditions as the rest.
Similarly, another of the contract's innovations is related to the guarantee of substitutions and the implementation of new services. The awarded company must have the necessary mechanisms and resources to respond to needs that may arise during the course, guarantee service coverage in all islands, and ensure continuity of care when staff absences occur. This response capacity has a specific weight in the award itself: the management of substitutions will be valued with up to fifteen points and that of new services, with another fifteen, being the two criteria with the highest score in the procedure.
The new contract also reinforces the coordination and monitoring of the service in educational centers and incorporates mandatory training for the staff responsible for its provision. Among the criteria that will be taken into account for its award is the implementation of an online staff attendance control system, valued at up to ten points. Likewise, it will be taken into account that companies have more than two coordinators for the execution of the contract, as well as the number of monthly visits these professionals make to each educational center.
In this way, the quality and organization of the provision will carry more weight than the price when resolving the tender. Specifically, sixty out of one hundred points correspond to qualitative criteria, while the remaining forty are assigned to the economic offer. The management of substitutions and new services accounts for thirty of those sixty points, while the other thirty are distributed among staff attendance control, the availability of additional coordinators, and the frequency of coordination visits to the centers.
Double the investment
The new contract, the tender for which will be processed through an open procedure and is expected to begin to be provided in 2027 once the award process is completed, represents a significant increase in the resources allocated to this service during the current legislature. The forecast of 26.6 million euros for 2027 is more than double the thirteen million allocated to the external educational assistant service in 2023 and continues the budgetary growth recorded during recent academic years.
This funding will allow for a service whose demand does not remain constant over time. The needs depend on the characteristics of the students enrolled at any given time and may necessitate the incorporation of new support during the academic year, a circumstance that is taken into account in the design of the new contract.
85 percent of this investment will be financed by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+), through the ‘Child Guarantee’ priority and, within it, the support measures aimed at students with specific educational support needs.
This tender is part of the work carried out by the area led by Poli Suárez to increase the resources allocated to diversity care during the current legislature. In this regard, the Canary Islands has 3,726 teachers dedicated to diversity care this academic year, compared to 2,638 in the 2023/24 academic year, for which an investment of 52 million euros has been allocated. The number of assistants has also increased, from 941 at the beginning of the 2022/23 academic year to 1,907 in the system as of September 30 of this academic year.
To these resources must be added the creation of 48 new Enclave classrooms, bringing the network to 382 active ones, as well as the incorporation this academic year of the new Special Education Center (CEE) in Adeje, which responds to a historical demand from the educational community in the south of Tenerife. Likewise, this academic year an allocation of two hundred euros per student has been established to cover the acquisition of specific materials and resources for their educational care. The measure benefits 869 students from the fifteen Special Education centers in the Canary Islands and represents an investment of 173,800 euros.
The reinforcement of these resources responds to the need to offer more individualized care tailored to the needs of each student. In this sense, the expansion of places, Enclave classrooms or Special Education centers does not seek to increase schooling in specific modalities, but rather to reduce ratios, improve the quality of care and bring resources closer to the areas where this need exists, also avoiding, whenever possible, long journeys for students and their families. All of this is part of an inclusion model that contemplates different responses and supports depending on the needs of each student.
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