Reading comprehension in Catalonia has fallen to the lowest levels in Europe (surpassed only by Turkey and Belgium) and Spain (Ceuta and Melilla), according to the international report Pirls 2021 published yesterday by autonomous communities by the Ministry of Education and FP, fifteen days after giving the national data.
This report, which measures the reading comprehension of 4th grade children (between 10 and 11 years old), observes a drop in Catalonia of 15 points compared to 2016, from 522 it had gone to 507 in 2021. This is double of the regression of Spain and the OECD, which the study attributes, partially, to the confinements of the pandemic.
However, the Catalan results are not attributable to school closures, or not only, since 45 days were closed throughout Spain during the spring of 2020, while the differences between Asturias (550) and Catalonia (507) they are 43 points.
“We are not surprised by these results”, indicated sources from the Department of Education. “In 2016 we were already at the bottom of all communities and, on the other hand, we already had the thermometer from the basic skills assessments that we did annually and which indicated a low performance in the language”, the same sources assured yesterday . “That’s why we have already started many initiatives and we hope to present a reading plan in July, with the Department of Culture, based on the promotion of school libraries”.
The data, already low, for 2016 became known in December 2017, after the October 2017 referendum and with Article 155 applied. Then, these sources admit, no specific action was taken. Then came the pandemic. And it wasn’t until March 2022, with the language skills data for 2021 in sharp decline, when the Government agreed to act and prepare a national book and reading plan to reverse the situation by joining the Culture departments to the project and Education. This is the plan that will be presented in July, but of which some brushstrokes were given yesterday.
Education attributed, in any case, the decline to the increase in the immigrant population, which has gone from 14% in 2006 to 35% today. “It is a population that is more disconnected from education, that accompanies or can accompany their children less and has a lower expectation about their future”, they added. The same sources also ruled out that the origin could be in learning to read in a non-native language. “It has no relation. The results of basic skills are sometimes better in Catalan than in Spanish”, they answered.
There will be no general instructions for schools to improve their students’ reading comprehension. “Each center knows what it has to do”, they indicated. In any case, the ministry considers that it is not the time to put pressure on the teachers and that this year, due to the process of stabilizing places, there will be a strong mobility of personnel between the centers and if the reading plan is not written “it is more volatile”. It can be recommended that centers with low results use the five hours of curriculum autonomy granted by Lomloe in improving reading.
The children who entered the Pirls two years ago, now, this year, are in the 6th grade and have just passed their basic skills test, so Education will see, as he says, if they have managed to improve in these two years.
For the Jaume Bofill Foundation, which has been instrumental in the promotion of reading, this is not enough and urges the Government to implement reading activities during the summer for the most vulnerable students.
The book plan is based on the strengthening of school libraries with “intensive” endowment in 50 highly complex educational centers, and an impulse plan in 200 centers with management programming, a digital reading platform and networking .
Also, the inspectors will be instructed to accompany the educational centers in their reading plans, to help implement methodologies and to remind the managements that the half hour of daily reading required by the new curricula must be fulfilled de la Lomloe, which in secondary school can be added and done one day a week.
Another planned front is to sensitize families to improve the reading habit, especially among those with a low cultural background. Parameters such as reading aloud or the number of books at home (only 16% of households with children have more than 200 books) correlate with reading comprehension.
These negative data condition the educational success of schoolchildren, since reading comprehension is the necessary basis for learning the rest of the disciplines. On average, 15-year-old students who read daily for pleasure have a score higher than a year and a half of schooling compared to the rest, according to the OECD.
