The Generalitat is working to adapt the linguistic model of Catalan schools. This will be the response that the Government gives to the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia this Friday, when the deadline to comply with the sentence that imposed that the centers teach at least 25% of the classes in Spanish. From Education they reject the ruling and assure that the new normative framework will not incorporate any percentage but, at the same time, they assure that the new regulations will guarantee the complete knowledge of the two languages.
“What the Government is doing is responding to the Court by deploying a regulatory framework that gives an absolute guarantee that the educational objectives are achieved in both languages and not by applying percentages”, explained Minister Josep González Cambray. “We do not accept methodologies by percentages and with the current scenario it still makes less sense than ever”, he added. The first step of the Government will be to submit the new decree to prior consultation for a month, a way to ensure the “maximum consensus” on this issue, he has said.
In the press conference after the Executive Council, Minister Cambray has also promised that the application of the new regulations will have the effect that Catalan will increase in the next courses. An objective that has ensured that it comes to solve the bad situation of the Catalan language that, according to his data, has suffered a great drop in educational centers. “Surely we haven’t done enough in recent years. But the school is only part of the solution, not the only solution”, Cambray pointed out.
From a legal point of view, the plan of the Generalitat is to deploy the education law of Catalonia, through the provisions that outline the linguistic framework within which the linguistic plans of each center must be inserted. In this sense, the Minister has avoided answering if once it is applied there may be schools that teach less than 25% of the syllabus in Spanish, because the Government refuses to refer to these percentages, considering them useless.
“The new regulatory framework that begins today will include the Report of the Linguistic Advisory Council, the new learning methodologies and the socio-linguistic reality of our country. And we will do so in response to the Catalan education law, which guarantees that when students finish the stage they must know both languages. Learning the leagues does not lead to percentages”, insisted Cambray. Despite the journalists’ questions, the Catalan head of Education has avoided answering whether or not this new decree complies with the sentence.
Nor has the Government cleared today what it will do if, at some point from Friday, the TSJC ends up agreeing to the forced execution of the sentence. As he has insisted, his only action will be to continue preparing and processing this new regulatory framework.
Also in the field of Education, Cambray has referred to the opinion approved this Monday by the School Council of Catalonia, in which it recommended a one-year moratorium on the advancement of the escort calendar. The calendar is one of the main reasons that has pushed the five-day strike of the majority unions among teachers. The Minister, however, has assured that these reports are recommendations and not binding, and rejected that the department is considering this moratorium.
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