Education announces that FP students will contribute to Social Security for internships

The students of the new Vocational Training will contribute to Social Security for their work practices. This was announced this morning by the Minister of Education, Pilar Alegría, at an informative breakfast for Europa Press. Alegría added that the contributions will be subsidized by the Government at 90%, thus anticipating one of the possible problems of forcing companies to contribute for their students: that they cannot assume it and the supply of places is jeopardized.

Thousands of scholarship holders await the extension of their rights while the collapse of those who charge and contribute continues

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This decision – which for the time being has just been announced by the ministry – will initially affect Intermediate Vocational Training students (from 16 years of age) and Higher Level Vocational Training students (from 18 years of age) both in the standard modality (which implies that the student spends between 25% and 35% of the training time in the company) and in the intensive (more than 35% of the time doing internships) and does not necessarily imply that they will be charged for the internship itself . But it will be mandatory for them to carry out these practices. More than 900,000 students are currently studying these two stages of Vocational Training.

However, it is not the first time that it has been announced that FP students will have to contribute to Social Security: in 2019 a provision was published in the BOE –lost in one of the laws known as omnibus, which affect several unrelated regulations– which also required that all students doing internships, both university and FP, contribute to Social Security. It never came into force.

Now the Government is resuming all that momentum and also tries to carry out the Scholarship Statute, which also provides that all university students contribute. This negotiation with the social agents is somewhat delayed – it is led by Labor, which had been given for three months – and it comes when the price of current interns plummeted, in part because the pandemic curtailed internships.

Following in the footsteps of Germany

The Government has great hopes placed in the reform of the FP, which has a new law with a broad consensus for a few monthsto reduce from early educational abandonment to the high rate of youth unemployment that Spain has, which is around 30%.

For it, the new law is based on the German model, which is considered the best in the world. If the indicator of that is youth unemployment, in the German country it is 5%.

In the German model, students spend two-thirds of their total time (66%) in companies and receive an average salary of 850 euros per month from day one. Part of the key to its success –and the same reason that raises skepticism about its implementation in Spain– is the wide range of internships offered by companies, a circumstance that is not clear will occur easily in one country, Spain. , where the vast majority of companies are micro-SMEs that cannot afford the resources required to have a company tutor.

Among the novelties announced by the minister is that the students who are not going to attend the intensive modality (more than 35% of the time in the company), who will be covered by some type of agreement between the training center and the company -in a legal yet to be determined–, will also be quoted, copper or not. Those who take advantage of the intensive modality will have a training contract that already included the payment of Social Security fees.