What the oposiciones de Maestros are
The Cuerpo de Maestros is the teaching body that staffs Spanish public Educacion Infantil and Educacion Primaria schools. Entry is by concurso-oposicion, the two phase system regulated nationally by Real Decreto 276/2007, which approved the reglamento de ingreso, accesos y adquisicion de nuevas especialidades for the teaching bodies, later modified by Real Decreto 270/2022.
The decisive structural fact is that the national framework sets the rules but does not run the process. Each comunidad autonoma convokes its own places through its Consejeria de Educacion, publishes its own bases, fixes its own calendar and runs its own tribunales; the Ministerio de Educacion, Formacion Profesional y Deportes convokes only for its own territorial scope. A candidate therefore chooses a territory as well as a specialty, and the convocatoria of that territory, not a national one, is the document that governs everything.
Concurso-oposicion, and why that word matters
An oposicion scores only the exams. A concurso-oposicion adds a merit phase, and for teaching posts that merit phase is not decoration: prior teaching experience in public education, academic qualifications and other merits listed in the baremo are scored and added to the oposicion mark. Two candidates with the same exam performance are separated by their baremo. This is why the interino route into teaching and the oposicion are so entangled in Spain: time worked as an interino is exactly what the concurso phase rewards.
The relative weight of the two phases is fixed by the convocatoria within the framework of the reglamento, and it has changed with successive reforms, so it has to be read in the bases of the specific call rather than assumed from a previous cycle.
The two pruebas
The fase de oposicion is built from two tests.
The first is about subject knowledge. It has a Parte A, the written development of one tema drawn at random from the temario of the specialty, and a Parte B, a prueba practica meant to show that the candidate can actually do what the specialty teaches. The temario for the Primaria specialty of the Cuerpo de Maestros is the one approved by Orden ECI/592/2007.
The second test is about pedagogical aptitude and is defended orally before the tribunal. The candidate presents a programacion didactica written in advance for one academic year, specifying objectives, contents, evaluation criteria, methodology and the attention to pupils with specific educational support needs, and then prepares and presents one unidad didactica. Several 2026 convocatorias weighted the unidad didactica above the programacion inside this second test, which is a useful signal about where the tribunal’s attention actually goes.
The fase de practicas
Passing the concurso-oposicion produces an appointment as funcionario en practicas, not yet as funcionario de carrera. The candidate teaches a supervised period, is assessed by report, and only a positive assessment confirms the appointment. A negative assessment allows the period to be repeated once.
What candidates get wrong
Writing the programacion didactica late. It is a document of real length that has to be coherent with a curriculum and defensible under questioning, and it cannot be improvised in the weeks after the written test. The second recurring error is reading the wrong convocatoria: specialties offered, number of temas drawn, weightings, language requirements and calendar all vary between comunidades autonomas, and advice written for one region is regularly wrong in another. The official links block above points to the national reglamento and to examples of regional convocatorias; the binding text is always the one published by the administration a candidate is applying to.