The main demonstration, which started in Plaza de San Agustín and marched through the center of Valencia to Plaza de la Virgen, gathered thousands of teachers. These mobilizations also had replicas in Alicante, Castelló, and Elche, showing broad support for the call.
The five unions represented in the Sectoral Table (STEPV, ANPE, CSIF, CCOO, and UGT) have shown unprecedented unity in decades. While the Ministry of Education has estimated strike participation at around 47%, unions raise this figure to between 85% and 95%, claiming that official calculations do not reflect reality.
“"It is the first day of the historic and unprecedented strike in education, an indefinite strike, and we demand that the Ministry sits down to negotiate, that it puts on the table a proposal for all the issues we are demanding, which it has not done yet, and that we sit down to negotiate in a real and effective way because we have nothing."
Unions criticize that the Ministry includes teachers on leave as non-strikers and that the count was made before many school principals, working with minimum services, could enter the data. The main demand is for the Ministry to promptly negotiate their demands, which include reducing student-teacher ratios, improving staff, dignified infrastructure, reducing bureaucracy, and salary issues.
The Minister of Education has stated that there will be a meeting if the unions wish, but has indicated that positions are very far apart. The strike, which has not occurred on this scale since the late 1980s, threatens to be indefinite if an agreement is not reached.
