Councilor Anna Simó yesterday positively assessed the plan to reinforce mathematics and reading comprehension announced by the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, on Sunday. As he explained, the measures “are aligned” with the proposals that the councilor herself forwarded to the Minister of Education and Training, , a few weeks ago. “We have the will to work bilaterally”, he stated during a press conference in which he also asked the Government to respect its competence in education. Previously, President Pere Aragonès had criticized Sánchez for announcing a plan “without entrusting himself to anyone” when the powers are autonomous.
Sánchez announced a reinforcement plan for students from 3rd grade to 4th grade of ESO that includes, among other aspects, splitting classes in mathematics and reading, and also extracurricular reinforcement classes. The plan, subject to the approval of the general budgets for 2024, is estimated at 500 million euros.
The Ministry of Education will meet with the State School Board on Thursday to start defining the criteria. Later he will do it with the regional councillors, the majority of the PP, who yesterday criticized the measure for “arriving late” and because it reflects the “shortcomings” of the educational model.
Simó advanced that he will ask that the distribution of this amount be guided by criteria of equity and include indicators of the student’s income and origin. “More should be invested in the students with the most needs and more resources should be provided to the centers of high complexity”, said Simó.
The councilor contextualized Sánchez’s proposal in the context of the meeting she held with Minister Alegría on December 28, in which she conveyed to her a series of priorities, a “bilateral four-year plan”, with cooperation measures territorial
Among the measures is the investment in reception classrooms and language learning acceleration classrooms for foreign teenagers. Catalonia is, together with Andalusia, the community with the most immigrant students. “These students arrive in the middle of the year or at the end, with personal backpacks very different from the students who started in kindergarten”, indicated Simó. In this sense, he recalled the immigration fund promoted by President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which was no longer funded in 2011.
The Catalan proposal will also incorporate the proportion of vulnerable students per municipality that is included in the last report of the Ombudsman. It also hopes to endow with more resources the 250 centers identified with the most room for improvement in basic skills (mathematics and language).
In the meeting with Alegría, Simó also brought up the need to strengthen induction into teaching (a MIR program for teachers that the Government started this year under the name of Sensei), the fight against school dropout (with more counselors in ESO) and the improvement of inclusive education.
“We understand that the Spanish Government has started working on this line”, he said, and rejected the excessive concreteness of some measures such as the splitting of classrooms. “There are centers that prefer to split and others opt for co-teaching. Just as we ask that our competence in education be respected, we believe that we must respect the initiatives of the centers”. In his opinion, the Administration should be able to offer a catalog of opportunities for resources and support (child education technicians, social educators, psychopedagogues…) so that each center can choose based on the profile of its students.
To reverse the poor PISA results in Catalonia, the Government has appointed a group of experts who will present a preliminary report to Parliament at the end of the month. The councilor downplayed the possible contradiction between the government measures and those proposed by the driving group. “They are teachers, they know the day-to-day life of the classroom.”
On the other hand, the minister presented, as part of an agreement with the Catalan Corporation for Audiovisual Media – 3Cat, an educational content platform for teachers and families. The aim of this new platform, which will be activated in May, is to cover all educational stages. It will be linked to the school curriculum and will offer short videos on mathematics, language, science, art or the history of Catalonia.
