The Early Childhood Education teachers who have passed the entrance exams held last June in the Canary Islands and who will join their jobs on September 3 could be left without a place once the course has started. And it is that a few days before the school period begins, the Ministry of Education of the Government of the Canary Islands has annulled the selective process for the allocation of Early Childhood Education places, after receiving several claims for irregularities in "the evaluation criteria applied by the Evaluation Tribunal of this specialty".
In general terms, "the irregularities are specified in the fact that in the opposition phase the same number of people approved as the number of places available, so the competition phase - after the exam - was absolutely distorted", according to Fernando Pellicer, member of STEC - Intersindical Canaria.
In this sense, there are two groups of affected people. Those applicants who have failed "irregularly", because they did not enter the second phase of the selection, and the teachers, who currently appear as approved and who have been assigned an educational center in which they will begin to work from this Monday, but "provisionally", since the Ministry has ruled to "retrocede the actions already carried out to the opposition phase", so they could be left out of the selection once the review is finished.
From the STEC-Intersindical Canaria union, they demand solutions and responsibilities from the Ministry and denounce that the Evaluation Tribunal has been "handpicked." "The Ministry has not been able to choose the right people or instruct them with the appropriate criteria," they argue from the union. In the same way, they denounce the delay in the resolution of claims that were made in "July", and that have been resolved a week before the start of the school year.
On Saturday, the highest body of the STEC has planned a meeting to legally analyze a "very serious situation generated by the ineptitude, inefficiency and negligence of the Ministry." For the moment, it has offered legal advice to all the "hundreds of affected people throughout the Canary Islands."
