STERM flags 78–80 applicants per tribunal

Murcia’s 2026 teacher exams have run into a very practical problem — too many candidates packed into too few tribunals. STERM Intersindical says the final distribution for the oposición al Cuerpo de Maestros leaves several specialities with 78, 79, or even 80 applicants per tribunal, which is well above the level unions consider manageable. That matters because these tribunals do not just supervise an exam day. They have to read, score, deliberate, and defend decisions across a long selection process. And in Murcia, that already went badly in the 2025 secondary round. ### What actually changed? The trigger was the publication of Murcia’s definitive admitted-and-excluded lists and the tribunal distribution for the 2026 primary-teacher process on May 6, 2026. Once those final numbers landed, unions stopped talking about the candidate-per-place ratio and started talking about the candidate-per-tribunal ratio — because that is the number that tells you how much work each examining panel will really carry. (rrhheducacion.carm.es) ### Which specialities are most crowded? STERM’s figures are the ones getting attention. The union says English and Physical Education sit at 78 applicants per tribunal, Primary and Infant Education at 79, and Therapeutic Pedagogy at 80. In other words, every one of those specialities is above 70, and the busiest one is brushing right up against the low 80s. (diariodeuninterinonopreferente.com) ### Why does “per tribunal” matter so much? Because the tribunal is the bottleneck. A region can advertise a big number of places, but each panel still has to process individual candidates one by one. That means written papers, oral presentations, scoring, meetings, paperwork, and possible complaints. A high applicant-to-tribunal ratio is basically a workload warning light — not just a statistic about competition. (rrhheducacion.carm.es) ### Is this just STERM complaining? No — that is the interesting part. ANPE Murcia also warned this week about overcrowding in the same process and said some tribunals reach as many as 82 applicants. So this is not one union trying to grab attention. Different organizations are looking at the published distribution and reaching the same broad conclusion: the process is overloaded. (tercerainformacion.es) ### But weren’t there lots of places this year? Yes. ANPE described 2026 as the biggest offer in Murcia’s history for the Cuerpo de Maestros, with 1,607 places. But a generous number of places does not solve the tribunal problem on its own. Turns out those are two different ratios. One tells you how many jobs exist. The other tells you how much work each examining panel has to absorb. (ciudaddemurcia.es) ### Why is 2025 hanging over this? STERM explicitly links the risk to the “desastroso” 2025 secondary-teacher process. The union’s argument is simple: if tribunals are stretched again, Murcia could repeat the same pattern of stress, delays, and weaker guarantees for candidates and examiners. That comparison is doing a lot of the political work here, because it turns a staffing complaint into a warning about fairness. (ciudaddemurcia.es) ### So what is the real fight about? It is about whether the administration gave the process enough examining capacity. Unions are not saying the opposition should disappear. They are saying the region should not run a mass selection exercise with tribunal loads that make careful assessment harder. Once candidate numbers are fixed, the only real lever left is how many tribunals you create and how they are staffed. (tercerainformacion.es) ### What’s the bottom line? The news here is not that Murcia has a competitive teacher exam — that is normal. The news is that, after the final May 2026 lists, multiple specialities landed near 80 candidates per tribunal, and more than one union now thinks that is high enough to threaten the quality of the process. (rrhheducacion.carm.es) (tercerainformacion.es)