The 2023-2024 school year begins on Wednesday. Schools will once again be filled with the bustle of children. They will appear taller, darker, some changed, with their deepest voice. With their illusions and their fears. They will greet the teachers who have been working since Friday, preparing the school year.
A new course that must be, mainly, the one of the recovery of the level of studies lost. The lack of an express objective on the part of the administration has caused the academic collapse, driven by the pandemic, to give low results in areas such as mathematics, English, languages ??and, especially, reading comprehension, the basis of other learning.
The new Minister of Education, Anna Simó, has been commissioned by the Parliament to overcome the bad results accumulated in recent years and create new conditions to stop the bleeding of students who drop out of the educational system.
Simó returns from vacation with the reports studied and new proposals, some surgical, which he will announce tomorrow in a presentation to the press. He has an advantageous starting point, demographics.
There are 8,000 fewer students in schools compared to the previous year, with fewer children per class in the smallest classrooms, and an ESO that is becoming more oxygenated as the most crowded promotions leave the stage.
And it also has more resources. The educational centers will have one of the largest staff in history with the entry of 1,200 more teachers into the system.
Despite everything, the immediate context will not be easy with a strike called on September 6, the forecast of high temperatures with non-air-conditioned classrooms and the discomfort of teachers and professors due to the lack of time to prepare the course.
To this are added the urgent needs of the education system to which it will not be able to respond until the budget that the department will have in 2024 is known. The priorities will be seen with the distribution.
The Consell Superior d’Avaluació has not yet released the results of the exercises in Catalan, Spanish, English, mathematics and science-technology carried out by the students of 6th grade of primary school and 4th of ESO. The delay in delivering the results of these diagnostic evaluations is due, according to Educació, to the fact that the department commissioned a “fineer” analysis to delve into the causes of the decline.
The subjects that have suffered the most are mathematics, Catalan and English, which have fallen to historic lows. The range of students who do not reach the minimum has been expanded and that of the excellent ones has been cut. This year the oral performance has also been evaluated. In addition, in reading comprehension, Catalonia is in the lowest range in Europe.
“For years now, these have not been the good results we would like,” the minister admitted in a recent interview, announcing that on this occasion a change in trend is not “yet” foreseen.
The same occurs with early school leaving (young people under 24 years of age who have not finished ESO, FP or high school) in which Catalonia, with a growing 16.9%, is at the head of Spain.
The directors of the center regret that they do not have time to prepare the course well, present the new teachers to the faculty and coordinate the projects. The advancement of the school calendar has left the period before classes in three days.
Another concern is the replacement pool, which was empty last year, especially in certain ESO, baccalaureate and FP specialties.
The centers were desperate because substitutes did not arrive to make up for sick leave. Mathematics, Catalan, physics, technology and, most seriously, computer science in FP. The requirements for difficult-to-cover substitutions were lowered or professors of one specialty were allowed to give another.
The forecasts for the start of the school year are hot. A high thermal sensation (between 27 and 32 degrees in different parts of Catalonia). This temperature level is not sporadic. The heat is present more months a year (May, June, July, August, September) and is more intense. The meteorological projections for the coming years leave no room for doubt.
However, schools have never been a priority with the argument that when it is hot they are unoccupied. They are the only public buildings without air conditioning. The facilities are old and need to be renovated before efficient and sustainable systems such as solar panels can be installed. Only a hundred schools, out of a total of 3,500, are built with thermal comfort criteria, according to Educació. And action has been taken on some 300 more centers.
The opportunity to benefit schools with European funds has been lost. The lack of resolution could increase the discomfort of families and teachers at the beginning and end of the course.
Educació has convened the sectoral table to explain the start of the course on September 5, the day before the teachers’ strike called by the majority union Ustec that demands the return of the fringes of the 2010 cuts, such as the recognition of the debt by the stadiums and the reduction of two teaching hours for those over 55 years of age.
A large mobilization is not expected, but Ustec maintains it to remind Educació that the conflict is alive. The minister, for her part, has spoken in favor of improving these conditions when she has the 2024 budget.
A transcendental ruling from the Constitutional Court (TC) is expected on the use of Spanish in Catalan schools. The TC at the request of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) must assess the constitutionality of the law on the use of languages ??in school, approved in July 2022 by Parliament.
On languages, the TC considered last April, before an appeal on the Lomloe, that “the necessary fixing by the State of a proportion of use of Spanish in the educational system does not derive from the Constitution”, but rather “a pattern of balance or equality between languages” and an effective right to use them.
The strong demand in recent years to enroll in training cycles has made it necessary to fill classrooms with over-ratios (up to 33 students per class), especially in places and qualifications that are in high demand. New VT centers have been opened, but there is a lack of teachers and more investment in infrastructure.
The result of the pre-registration process for this course is unknown since Educació has not published the number of students who did not obtain a place in July. In previous years it was seen that thousands of students had not obtained a place in what they had chosen, which led them to enroll in private centers or give up.
On September 6 and 7 a new pre-registration process opens and on the 8th the list of admitted students will be published so that they can enroll before the start of the course on the 12th, avoiding what has happened in recent years in which numerous students They enrolled once the course started.
On the other hand, Educació has launched the decree that should regulate the academic organization corresponding to Lomloe. This will not be released before May or June 2024, two months before the educational centers must apply them.
The secretary of educational transformation, Núria Mora, leaves office. This secretariat, created by Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray when he took office, will continue. Simó has announced that he will soon announce the name of the substitute person.
