Teachers from Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera will be able to retire at 70 years old
The new criteria for authorizing retirement extensions will come into effect next year; in Mallorca they will only be granted to members of management teams and to those occupying hard-to-fill positions
PalmaTeachers in Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera will be able to continue working until age 70 if they request it from the 2026-2027 academic year. The Minister of Education and Universities, Antoni Vera, announced this Wednesday that the Ministry will approve an instruction with new criteria to authorize retirement extensions for teaching civil servants over 65 years of age, which will differentiate the conditions according to the needs of each island.
Until now, teachers could request the extension of their stay in active service once they turned 65 and continue working until they were 70, as long as the Ministry authorized the extension.
Teacher shortage
With the new instruction, the Government will adapt this procedure to the difficulties in covering certain specialties. Thus, in Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera, extensions will be authorized for teachers who request them, with the aim of facilitating staff coverage on islands where the lack of teachers continues to be a difficulty.
The situation will be different in Mallorca. On this island, extensions will only be granted to teachers who are part of the management teams or to those who occupy positions qualified as difficult to cover. With this criterion, the Ministry intends to guarantee continuity in the management of schools when necessary and, at the same time, maintain coverage for specialties with more problems in finding teachers.
As Vera explained, the modification responds to the differentiated reality of the educational system on each island. While in Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera there are persistent difficulties in incorporating teachers in various specialties, in Mallorca the situation is less strained and allows for more restrictive criteria to be applied. The instruction will come into effect next school year and will regulate the new conditions for granting retirement extensions to teaching officials who wish to continue working beyond the age of 65.
Union rejection
STEI has rejected the measure announced by the Ministry of Education for three main reasons. Firstly, the union denounces that the possibility for teachers in Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera to continue working until they are 70 years old has not been negotiated in the Sectoral Education Board.
Furthermore, the organization argues that the priority should be to reinstate voluntary retirement at 60 years old for all teaching staff, rather than extending working lives. According to STEI, the current situation of the collective is marked by "tiredness and discontent," which, in their opinion, makes a measure of this type inadequate.
The union believes that the Government should promote structural measures to address the shortage of teachers in the Islands, especially in Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera. In this regard, it calls for action on the housing problem, which it identifies as one of the main causes of the difficulty in filling positions, and maintains that the announced proposal is "a new patch" that does not solve the underlying problem.
For its part, SIAU has lashed out against the measure, which it considers "a new display of nepotism" by the Ministry of Education. The organization denounces that the change establishes "privileges for some and impediments for others" and questions why a member of a management team will be able to extend their working life while a teacher without a position will not be able to do so. Furthermore, it questions with whom this regulatory modification has been negotiated. The union has announced that it will study the legal viability of the measure and warns that, if it detects irregularities, it will go to court. "We will not accept any tailor-made regulatory change to benefit specific individuals by name and surname," it concludes.