In brief

  • The national network of practice schools, that is the schools where future teachers do their classroom training, numbers 289 units in the 2026-2027 school year. That is exactly as many as last year, in the same 42 counties and with the same figures for each county.
  • Comparing the new annex with the one for 2025-2026 position by position, five lines change, all of them renamings or mergers of the same units. Not one school really enters the network and not one leaves it.
  • The order grants the status for 5 school years starting with 2026-2027, even though the methodology it invokes in the preamble had already set the same five-year period starting with 2025-2026. The result is two different expiry dates for the same school.
Act: Order no. 5.101/2026 of the Minister of Education and Research
Published: Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) no. 754 of 7 September 2026
In force from: 7 September 2026, the date of publication

On 7 September 2026, the first day of classes, the Ministry of Education and Research published the list of the 289 education units in which students and pupils training to become teachers will do their practice in the 2026-2027 school year. The act is called Order no. 5.101/2026, it appears in Official Gazette of Romania no. 754 and it replaces last year’s order. The list is the one universities and pedagogical high schools use to know where they can send people into the classroom, and it depends directly on the calendar for the reorganisation of education units for 2026-2027, because a school that has been merged or renamed can no longer be identified by its old name.

A practice school is an ordinary school with legal personality in which teaching practice takes place. In practical terms, it is the place where a student on a teaching master’s programme or on the psycho-pedagogical module, or a pupil at a high school with a pedagogical profile, first enters a classroom as a teacher, guided by an experienced colleague called a mentor teacher. The definition comes from Article 24(3) of Pre-university Education Law no. 198/2023 and covers both pupils of pedagogical high schools and students enrolled in university programmes for the teaching career, including the teaching master’s programme, and in postgraduate professional conversion programmes.

The annex has two parts. The first contains 60 high schools and colleges that teach in the pedagogical profile, between one and three in each of the 41 counties and in Bucharest. These hold the status as of right, without selection, because their very profile is the training of teachers. The second part contains 229 units with a different profile, from national colleges and technological high schools to kindergartens, lower secondary schools and school centres for inclusive education. These enter the network through a selection call organised by the ministry, on criteria of structure, facilities and, above all, staff: teachers entered in the national register of mentor teachers or in the Mentoring and Licensing Corps for the Teaching Career.

The order also says that the schools in the annex may be organised into teaching practice bases, BPP for short. A practice base is a group of schools around a coordinating one, designed so that the student experiences different settings: rural and urban, centre and periphery, simultaneous teaching, special education, even schooling in hospital. The coordinator of a base is the head or the deputy head of the coordinating practice school.

Another list of schools with a special status has just been published: MEC Order no. 5.557/2026 designates twenty high schools as pilot units, where in the twelfth grade up to 40% of lessons may be taught without in-person attendance.

What it changes in practice

From 7 September 2026, the 289 units in the annex are the only ones that can sign, as practice schools, the framework agreements with universities for practice placements. The methodology approved by Order no. 4.063/2025 requires a collaboration contract of 1 to 4 school years to be concluded on top of the framework agreement, and the duration of that contract may not exceed the period for which the school holds the status. This is exactly where the ambiguity described below, about the year in which the status expires, becomes a matter of signature rather than of theory.

For a head teacher, appearing on the list means a concrete obligation: Article 10 of the methodology requires the school’s rules of organisation to contain provisions on this status. For the county school inspectorates it means a deadline close at hand, between 1 September and 1 October 2026, by which they send the ministry the consolidated situation of the practice bases in the county, with the coordinating school, the component units and the number of the decision setting them up. The list of bases is then published on the inspectorate’s website, so that is where a student can check where they will actually end up.

For the teacher who acts as a mentor, the order changes nothing about money, because it says nothing about money. The rules lie elsewhere. Article 207(5) of Law no. 198/2023 provides that mentoring hours worked by staff holding a post are paid on an hourly basis, the equivalent of 4 hours a week, and paragraph (8) requires the mentor to do at least 4 hours of mentoring a week. On teaching load, Article LVIII of Law no. 141/2025 derogates from the law until the beginning of the 2029-2030 school year and sets 20 hours a week for teachers in lower secondary, upper secondary and post-secondary education and 18 hours for those with teaching grade I or the title of emeritus teacher who act as mentors. The reduction remains, but it is two hours, not four as the basic law provides, where the ratio is 18 to 14.

The order also gives the teacher training centres a task: to facilitate training programmes in teaching mentorship, with priority for teachers from practice schools. It provides no separate funding for this and no deadline.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

The order being replaced is no. 6.049/2025, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 861 of 19 September 2025. Compared line by line, the two annexes contain the same number of units, 289, the same division into sections, 60 and 229, the same 42 counties and exactly the same figures for each county. The difference comes down to five positions, and all five are the same units under a different name.

In Vâlcea, Liceul Tehnologic de Turism in Călimănești becomes Liceul de Turism și Servicii Publice „Neagoe Basarab”. In Iași, Liceul Tehnologic de Transporturi și de Construcții becomes Liceul Tehnologic „Henri Coandă”. In Cluj-Napoca, Școala Profesională Specială SAMUS becomes Liceul Tehnologic „SAMUS”. In Sighetu Marmației, two extended-hours kindergartens, numbers 7 and 9, no longer appear separately but as branches of Școala Gimnazială „Dr. Ioan Mihalyi de Apșa” and of Școala Gimnazială nr. 2 respectively. In other words, the network has not grown, has not shrunk and has not moved. It has been updated in line with the register of school names.

The pattern is visible earlier as well. Order no. 5.957/2024, published on 22 August 2024, said in a single article that for the 2024-2025 school year the composition of the 2023-2024 network was maintained. Last year’s order, however, added a new paragraph, the one granting the status for 5 school years, and the current order repeats it, moving the starting point one year further on.

One thing has visibly improved: the calendar. Last year the list appeared on 19 September, this year on 7 September, twelve days earlier in the calendar. It is still the day on which classes began, under Order no. 3.194/2026 on the structure of the 2026-2027 school year.

Advantages and disadvantages

What it improves

  • The list appears twelve days earlier than last year, which gives universities an extra week for agreements before the semester picks up pace.
  • The stability of the list is a real advantage for anyone planning ahead: a university that already has a contract with a school in the network does not have to look for another.
  • The updated names solve a practical problem, because a contract signed with a name that no longer exists causes trouble at inspection.
  • All 41 counties and the municipality of Bucharest have at least one unit in the network, so no county is left entirely uncovered.
  • The order keeps the option of organising practice bases, that is the mechanism through which a student can see both a neighbourhood school and one on the outskirts, not only the college in the centre.

What remains a problem

  • The network is heavily concentrated. Three counties, Bucharest, Iași and Cluj, account for 89 of the 289 units, that is almost 31%, while Caraș-Severin, Teleorman and Vaslui have one each.
  • Practice for early education rests on very little: 13 kindergartens out of 289 units, that is 4.5%. In Bucharest, where the network has 43 units, there is no kindergarten at all.
  • The status receives a new five-year term with no evaluation in between, even though the methodology ties any extension to an evaluation report drawn up at the end of the period.
  • The order says nothing about paying mentors, and a teacher looking for the answer has to open two other acts.
  • The annex is published only as a table in the Official Gazette of Romania, with no searchable version on the ministry’s website, so checking a school means reading seven pages.

Practical advice

  1. Look for your school by its current name and by locality, not by the name in the old contract. Five units have a different name from the previous list, and if a school has been merged it appears as a branch of another school.
  2. If you head a unit newly caught by the logic of the status, write the provisions on the practice school into the rules of organisation and operation. This is expressly required by Article 10 of the methodology approved by Order no. 4.063/2025.
  3. If you are negotiating a collaboration contract on behalf of a university, write into it a duration that ends by the close of the 2029-2030 school year. That is the version which holds under both readings of the term, until the ministry clarifies which expiry date applies.
  4. If you want to be a mentor teacher, check first the condition for joining the Mentoring and Licensing Corps for the Teaching Career: at least teaching grade II and at least 5 years of classroom experience, under Article 172 of Law no. 198/2023. The reduction in teaching load, however, requires teaching grade I or the title of emeritus teacher.
  5. If you are a student and the school where you want to do your practice is not on the list, tell your practice tutor. Article 6(2) of the methodology gives the university the right to ask the inspectorate for support within 10 days, and the inspectorate must identify a unit that can take the placement.
  6. For the practice bases, follow the website of your county school inspectorate after 1 October 2026. That is where the list with the coordinating school and the component units is published, that is where you actually end up.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly is a practice school?
It is an education unit with legal personality, from the ordinary network of schools, in which practical teaching activities take place. That is where pupils from high schools with a pedagogical profile and students enrolled in programmes for the teaching career, including the teaching master’s programme, go into the classroom under the guidance of a mentor teacher. The legal basis is Article 24 of Law no. 198/2023.
How do I find out whether my school is on the list?
The annex to the order, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 754 of 7 September 2026, at pages 9 to 15, has two tables: 60 high schools with a pedagogical profile and 229 units with a different profile, ordered by county. Look by the county code and by locality, then check the exact name.
What is the difference between the two sections of the annex?
The units in the first section teach in the pedagogical profile and hold the status as of right, under Article 3 of the methodology, because teacher training is their very profile. Those in the second section have a different profile and entered the network through a selection call organised by the ministry, on criteria of structure, human resources and facilities.
Does a mentor teacher get extra money?
There is no mentoring allowance or bonus. Article 207(5) of Law no. 198/2023 provides that mentoring hours worked by staff holding a post are paid on an hourly basis, the equivalent of 4 hours a week, and paragraph (8) requires at least 4 hours of mentoring a week. The 2026 order contains no financial provision at all.
Does a mentor have a reduced teaching load?
Yes, but less than the basic law says. Article LVIII of Law no. 141/2025 derogates from Law no. 198/2023, from the 2025-2026 school year until the beginning of the 2029-2030 school year, and sets 20 hours a week for teachers in lower secondary, upper secondary and post-secondary education and 18 hours for those with teaching grade I or the title of emeritus teacher who act as mentors. In the basic law the ratio was 18 to 14.
Who can be a mentor teacher?
Article 172(2) of Law no. 198/2023 sets up the Mentoring and Licensing Corps for the Teaching Career, made up of teaching staff with at least teaching grade II and at least 5 years of classroom experience. The procedure and the selection criteria are established by a methodology approved by ministerial order.
For how long does a school hold this status?
Here the answer is not a single one, and that is the main problem with the order. Article 1(2) says 5 school years starting with 2026-2027, so until the end of 2030-2031. Article 12 of the methodology invoked in the very preamble of the order says 5 school years starting with 2025-2026, so until the end of 2029-2030, „regardless of the year of inclusion”.
What is a teaching practice base?
It is a group of practice schools organised around a coordinating unit, so that practice can take place in different settings: different levels of education, rural and urban, simultaneous teaching, special education, schooling in hospital. The coordinator is the head or the deputy head of the coordinating school, and in counties without a university centre a single such base is set up.
What do students do if no school in the network matches their specialism?
The university sends the county school inspectorate a request for support within 10 days. The inspectorate identifies at least one unit that can organise the placement and endorses the framework agreement. At the end of the school year, that unit may ask to be included in the network starting with the following school year.
When does the order enter into force?
On 7 September 2026, the date of publication in the Official Gazette of Romania. Ministerial orders enter into force on publication unless the text provides a later date, under Article 12(3) of Law no. 24/2000. The order was signed on 26 August 2026 by the Minister of Education and Research, Mihai Dimian.

Errors and inconsistencies in the published text

  • Article 1(2), the five-year term conflicts with Article 12 of the methodology invoked in the preamble. The order grants the status „for a period of 5 school years, starting with the 2026-2027 school year”, so until the end of 2030-2031. Article 12 of the framework methodology approved by Order no. 4.063/2025, cited in the preamble of this very order as its basis, says that units in the network when the methodology entered into force, that is on 3 June 2025, keep their status „for a period of 5 school years, starting with the 2025-2026 school year, regardless of the year of inclusion”, so until the end of 2029-2030. Since the annex repeats the same 289 units as the previous order, almost every school on the list has two expiry dates, a year apart. The consequence is not theoretical: Article 6(4) of the same methodology forbids collaboration contracts with universities to exceed the period of the status, and Article 4(7) and (8) tie any extension to an evaluation report drawn up at the end of the five years. A school cannot know in which year it has to produce that report.
  • Article 1(2), the five-year term is applied to the 60 units that hold the status as of right as well. The paragraph refers without distinction to „the education units named in the annex”, so also to the 60 in the first section. For those, Article 3 of the methodology grants the status as of right, without a term and without selection, and Article 4(8), which governs extension after five years, expressly excludes units with a pedagogical profile. The result is that, at the end of 2030-2031, a pedagogical college either keeps its status as of right or loses it, with no procedure through which it could regain it.

Editorial analysis

The most interesting thing about this order is not visible on reading it, but on placing it beside last year’s: the two annexes match position by position, 289 units now and then, 60 in the first section and 229 in the second, the same 42 counties, the same figures for each county. Five lines change, and none of them is a new school. There are three renamings, in Călimănești, in Iași and in Cluj-Napoca, and two kindergartens in Sighetu Marmației that now appear as branches of lower secondary schools. An act that mobilises an approval report, a minister’s signature and seven pages of the Official Gazette of Romania in fact carries five corrections of names.

That raises a question of architecture. The 2025 methodology built a five-year cycle, with annual monitoring by the inspectorate, an evaluation report at the end of the period and a reasoned application from the school for an extension. The annual order, by contrast, resets the clock: the 2025 one started the five years from 2025-2026, the current one starts them from 2026-2027, and Article 2 extinguishes the previous order after a single one of the five years it had granted. A term that starts again every autumn no longer measures anything, and the evaluation at the end of it becomes a step that is never triggered. It is worth noting that Article 11(1) of the methodology authorises the annual order to approve the network „valid in the following school year”, that is for one year, not for five.

The calendar says something too. The approval report bears the date 17 August 2026, the order was signed on 26 August, five days before the 31 August deadline set by the methodology, and it was published on 7 September, twelve days after signature and seven days after the deadline. Since a ministerial order takes effect on publication, the network became enforceable on the very day classes began. It is still an improvement on last year, when the list appeared on 19 September. The difference between the nine days from report to signature and the twelve from signature to print shows where the time is lost, and there it is no longer the ministry of education that decides.

Finally, the map. Three counties account for 89 of the 289 units, almost 31%: Bucharest 43, Iași 26, Cluj 20. At the other end, Caraș-Severin, Teleorman and Vaslui have a single unit each, only the pedagogical high school, so a student from there who needs practice in a kindergarten or in a centre for inclusive education has to leave the county. By type, the network leans heavily towards upper secondary education: 144 colleges and 74 high schools, against 48 lower secondary schools and 13 kindergartens. The 13 kindergartens, that is 4.5% of the network, are in only ten counties, and in Bucharest, with 43 units, there is not one. For a system that complains about the shortage of early years teachers, that is a ratio which deserves an explanation. There is something else. Article 5 of the methodology requires the ministry to check annually that the „minimum number” of practice schools exists, but the phrase appears once in the whole text and is defined nowhere, so the check is made against a threshold that nobody has set.

What should be changed

  • The deadline in the methodology should be calculated from publication, not from signature. The date of 31 August ought to be the date of appearance in the Official Gazette of Romania, otherwise schools and universities receive the list after the school year has begun, and compliance with the deadline remains an internal formality of the ministry.
  • A single term for the status, set by the methodology and not repeated in the annual order. The annual order should merely approve the composition of the network for the following year, as Article 11 authorises it to do, and the duration of the status should stay where it was put, in Article 12. That would close the ambiguity of the two expiry dates and would make the end-of-cycle evaluation possible.
  • The annex should also be published as a spreadsheet file on the ministry’s website, with county, locality, level of education and profile. A student or a head teacher could search in a second, instead of going through seven pages of a scanned table, and universities could filter schools by the subject for which they need a placement.
  • The minimum number of practice schools should actually be set, by county and by level of education. Without a figure, the ministry’s obligation to check annually that this minimum exists can be neither fulfilled nor supervised, and a county with a single unit counts as being just as well covered as one with 43.
  • A selection call dedicated to kindergartens and primary education. With 13 kindergartens in the whole country and none in the capital, practical training for early education happens wherever it happens, not where someone decided it could be done well.
  • The order should say explicitly what happens from the 2027-2028 school year. That is when Articles 116 to 119 of Law no. 198/2023 enter into force, postponed by Article XLIII of Law no. 141/2025, and the coordination of the national network of practice schools passes to the National Centre for Training and Development in the Teaching Career, while the teacher training centres, to which Article 3(3) of the order gives a task, are abolished. Four of the five years of the status granted now fall under an institutional architecture that the order does not mention.

Original text of the legal act

The text below is reproduced in Romanian, the official form of publication.

The full text, as published in the Official Gazette of Romania

Official Gazette of Romania no. 754 of 7 September 2026 16 pages PDF, 270 KB the act starts on page 9

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This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific situations, consult a licensed attorney or tax advisor.