After months of debates about the causes why the performance of Catalan students has fallen in evaluations such as PISA 2022, teachers have given their opinion and have done so by responding to a survey prepared by CC.OO.: the main The causes for the drop in international evaluations are classrooms with too many students and the lack of educational personnel for inclusion.
In the survey, teachers could mark more than one reason why education has worsened. 62% believe that it is due to the high number of students per classroom and 53% to the lack of resources for inclusive education and classrooms that welcome foreign students. Almost half believe that investment in education is not enough.
Between 30 and 50 percent checked the box for the lack of discipline and the low recognition of education professionals as well as the little time they have to prepare classes. The survey is interesting in that it not only refocuses the debate on education from the perspective of teachers but also because of what this group does not consider to be the main cause. And they do not consider child poverty, school segregation, or the lack of resources in highly complex centers to be the main cause (less than 30%). Neither does work by competencies, new curricula or teacher training (initial and permanent). Not even the use of mobile phones by students.
Only 3% of those surveyed consider that there has been a decrease in the appreciation of basic academic content and that “excessive concern about the emotional responses and motivation of students may have shifted attention to learning itself.”
The survey, included in the report The state of education in Catalonia: its quality and its educational results, was presented this morning by the general secretary of the CC.OO. Education Federation, Teresa Esperabé, and the policy manager educational, Cristòfol Ortalà.
Both have celebrated that the responses on possible improvements coincided with the line of work that the union has carried out until now.
Esperabé has proposed for next September a reduction in the ratio to 20 students per class in the first year of ESO, high school and the middle cycle of Vocational Training (FP) and more educational personnel to reinforce the inclusive school (psychologists, speech therapists, children’s specialist technicians ). “In 2 or 3 years we would see the difference.” In addition, it plans to reach an investment of 6% of GDP in four years (there is an ILP presented).
For this, more personnel need to be hired, he said. “It is clear that there is a lack of hands,” she concluded. The report will be delivered to Minister Anna Simó next week.
For Esperabé, the conviction that education is fundamental is demonstrated, in the case of administration, with facts. The poor air conditioning in the classrooms reveals, in his opinion, the little importance given to it, since the institutions are putting measures in place to deal with the heat but the schools are not. Or the fact that there are not enough Catalan or mathematics teachers, but the secondary master’s degree that allows teaching in high schools does not become cheaper. “Fewer people have taken the exams than there are places,” he pointed out, which indicates a low social perception of the profession that is not being actively fought by the administration.
The teachers consulted by the union also mostly disapprove, three out of four, of the creation of a group of experts proposed by the Government to address the improvement of academic results.
For CC.OO., this committee, without the participation of the entire educational community and teachers specifically, “does not guarantee an accurate analysis of reality.” In his opinion, all school faculty and school councils should be consulted as was done in the case of the use of mobile phones in educational centers.
