Teachers are returning to work this week and in Catalonia they are doing so with a new Minister of Education, the socialist Esther Niubó. Of all the open fronts of the new government, that of the classrooms is perhaps one of the most urgent, not only because the start of the school year is fast approaching, on September 9, but also because the challenges are piling up, such as overcoming poor academic results or calming teachers’ malaise.
The PSC gains access to a portfolio, the Department of Education and Professional Training, which is almost completely foreign to it, since during the tripartite it was always in the hands of the ERC, with the exception of a brief six-month interruption in 2006. The president, Salvador Illa, has placed an advisor responsible for the file within the party for a decade, and who maintains a fluid relationship with all the actors, from unions to families and from the public to the concerted.
The objectives of the Socialists of Education, which Niubó will expose this week in the presentation of the new course, are above all to regain the trust of teachers, who have maintained a strong confrontation with the ERC government, in addition to overcoming the poor academic results attested by the PISA tests. The other great challenge, the department emphasizes, is to strengthen the FP, which they have decided to include for the first time in the official name of the department.
A mandate to reverse the results
As for school results, which have suffered a decline in both PISA and the external tests of the Generalitat, Illa recently stressed that they would take between four and six years. After the debacle of the 2022 OECD exams, which placed Catalonia last in Spain in reading comprehension, the educational data showed some improvement in mathematics or the Spanish language, but not in Catalan or English, which then lower them.
Miquel Àngel Alegre, project manager at the Jaume Bofill Foundation, considers improving learning to be the most urgent priority and approves of the horizon set by the CPS. “If they tell me that in four years the level will be comparable to that of Asturias, Castile and León or Denmark, I will sign it immediately. If we gain a few points in mathematics or Catalan, it will be little,” he says.
To achieve this, one of the first measures shared by educational actors is to provide stability and resources to teachers. “Education needs time, and in recent years we have undergone too many and very rapid changes, which has generated a malaise that must be urgently redirected,” says Teresa Esperabé, general secretary of Education of the CCOO union, who adds that they are willing to grant the advisor a hundred days of grace.
More resources and less change
Catalan teachers regret having had to digest in a few years a new curriculum, pedagogical innovation processes or an inclusive school model that does not have sufficient resources to meet the needs of the students with the most difficulties. Regarding the latter, they are asking for more funding and lower ratios. “We need more staff given the growing complexity of the student body,” says Iolanda Segura, spokesperson for the USTEC union.
Families also agree on many demands, calling for a strengthening of the public system and an increase in places. “There are historical gaps in secondary school and especially in vocational training, we have seen it in recent days,” says Lidón Gasull, director of the Affac Public School Families Association. In Vocational Training, more than 31,000 pre-registered students still do not have a place assigned due to the lack of supply in public education, which pushes many of them towards private education.
Sixth hour and immersion, hot potatoes
The list of pending challenges for the department of Niubó also includes other fronts that do not generate as much consensus within the educational community and that have been at the center of controversy in recent years. One of them is the advancement of the school calendar to the beginning of September, which ERC approved and then had to rectify in part due to the almost unanimous rejection it generated in the School Council. As for the coming year, the unions will try to delay the process a little more and it will be necessary to see how Niubó reacts.
The mayor is linked in some areas to the investiture canards with ERC and Comuns. With the first, he has committed to extending free education from level 0 to 3 – now it is only free in the I2 curriculum –, to maintaining the school voucher for each family at no less than 70 euros and to definitively put an end to schools that segregate according to sex – a task initiated by the Republicans – and, this will surely be a source of tension, “to maintain the advancement of the school calendar”.
With the Comuns, the agreement includes guaranteeing two free extracurricular afternoons per week and transforming the school canteen into a completely free service. It also envisages the controversial reestablishment of the “sixth hour” in public schools, that is, the increase in teaching hours to match those of the subsidized school. The unions are already warning that they will categorically oppose the latter.
Niubó will also have to decide whether to withdraw from the drawer the promised decree to regulate the concerted school and end its quotas, as well as whether to deepen the fight against school segregation, which the data show has been left halfway. And, finally, he will have to face like all his predecessors the attacks against the linguistic immersion model, always more present in the media and political sphere than in the daily life of schools.
The new councilor will adhere to the agreement for a new linguistic model that she herself was the architect of and that included ERC, Comuns and Junts. The current regulation establishes that Catalan is the language of habitual use, although it also considers Spanish as a school language, always depending on each center. With this framework, Niubó knows that this will be observed from all sides, both those who will monitor any decline in Catalan in the classrooms and those who will continue to push to definitively introduce bilingualism in the classrooms.
