A Catalan secondary school teacher making over €2,300 a month was fired for refusing to grade students, skipping meetings, and working remotely without approval. The region’s top court has ruled the dismissal was justified, drawing a clear line on teacher autonomy in private schools.
A secondary school teacher in Catalonia, earning more than €2,300 net per month, has lost his job after he repeatedly refused to grade students, skipped required meetings, and worked from home without permission. The Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Cataluña has now confirmed the firing was justified. This is a rare but clear move in the ongoing debate over what teachers must do and how much power schools have.
The dispute picked up in late 2021. The teacher, who had worked at the private school since 2011 on a permanent part-time contract, filed a complaint with the Inspección de Trabajo y Seguridad Social. He said the school was breaking his contract by giving him more non-teaching hours than allowed, some in the afternoon. In May 2022, the school gave him a formal order: finish work at 13:30, leave the building except for Monday staff meetings, and do not take on tasks or telework without approval. The message was direct—keep breaking the rules and you could face discipline.
According to a summary published by Libertad Digital, the teacher continued to miss mandatory meetings and perform part of his work without authorization, even after repeated warnings from the school administration.
Still, the teacher kept ignoring the school’s orders. At the start of the 2022-23 school year, he missed every Monday meeting. He kept sending weekly emails listing tasks he did outside official hours and by telework, directly against school instructions. The administration sent him a registered letter, repeating the rules, asking for reasons for his absences, and telling him to stop reporting on banned telework. The school did not punish him for earlier absences, hoping to settle things. After October 17, he started going to meetings again, but the pattern of defiance did not stop.
By late October, the teacher wrote that his schedule left only four half-hour breaks a week for planning and grading. He said the workload was impossible to handle in that time. He accused the school of refusing to say which tasks to drop or prioritize. He took his complaint back to the labor inspectorate. In November and December, he kept sending weekly updates about duties he had not finished or only partly completed. In December, the situation broke down. He failed to grade some subjects for first, second, and fourth-year ESO students.
On January 24, 2023, the school fired him for disciplinary reasons. They cited disobedience, breaking good faith, and cutting back on his work by choice. Both the Social Court No. 25 of Barcelona and the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Cataluña backed the school. The courts ruled the teacher’s actions were serious misconduct and said no basic rights had been violated. The full ruling is posted on the official judicial website for public access.
Spanish labor law establishes that disciplinary dismissals can be challenged within 20 working days, and courts assess both the seriousness of the misconduct and whether the employer followed proper procedures. In this case, both the first instance and appellate courts found the dismissal to be procedente, or justified, due to repeated insubordination and breach of duties.
This case is clear-cut. The courts have set a firm limit on how far individual autonomy goes in private schools. The teacher’s complaints about workload and scheduling may sound familiar to others in the field, but the legal outcome is blunt about what happens if you keep defying orders. As seen in other legal disputes, like those reported earlier, Catalan courts are willing to enforce school discipline when the facts are clear and the process is followed.
The verdict sends a direct message to teachers and school leaders: contracts and internal rules are not optional, even for long-serving staff. The court’s decision backs the right of private schools to set and enforce clear boundaries. It shows that appeals to workload or autonomy will not outweigh direct instructions or repeated warnings. For Catalonia’s education sector, this ruling is a reminder that professional independence has limits—and those limits are set by the courts, not by personal opinion.
