School contract renewal, negotiations resume on 12 May at Aran

Bargaining will soon begin on the regulatory section of the contract for the three-year period 2025-27 for school staff, a negotiation that follows that on the economic section on which the final agreement was reached on 1 April: next week, Tuesday 12 May, and then Tuesday 26 May, the representative trade unions will go to Aran for the first two meetings aimed at revising the rules governing the professional life of more than 1.3 million employees of the Education and Public Research sectors.

Among the points to be dealt with are the facilitated redemption of the university degree for the purpose of early retirement, the reintroduction of the double recruitment channel, the provisional assignment also for those who have children up to the age of 16, the introduction of meal vouchers, the revision of the seniority scale, with the return of the first step to 3 years and the passage to the next step every four years at the most, the reconstruction of careers with full validity of the service performed in parochial institutions to inter-departmental mobility for staff expressing this aspiration, the specific fund to be allocated for school staff, the introduction of a fair Service Charter that also involves categories of workers, such as temporary workers with short substitutions and administrative, technical and auxiliary staff.

"We must work closely with Aran," says Marcello Pacifico, national president of Anief, "to arrive at a plan to revise the rules as much as possible shared: school workers, substitute teachers, those who have been appointed and those at the end of their careers, have long been asking for contractual provisions that meet real needs: the organisation of work, the allocation of fair remuneration, the introduction of benefits now customary for all other public and private administrations, the concrete possibility to make a career, the generalised equalisation of rights, are only a few examples of how school professions could and should function better. We have the opportunity to change things, it is right to make this a reality,' Pacifico concludes.