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🇪🇸 Spain /Culture & Society

Catalonia’s education system needs a rethink of inclusive schooling

From La Vanguardia · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Interview Named sources Context piece
  • Catalonia’s education minister, Esther Niubó, begins the school year amid a strike and after Catalonia was left out of the PISA report.
  • Niubó rejects repealing the decade-old inclusive education decree but says its impact should be reviewed and its future agreed through public debate.
  • She calls for a shift from confrontation to dialogue with unions and says the education budget, which has risen 25%, may need to increase further.

Esther Niubó begins the new school year with a teachers’ strike, Catalonia absent from the PISA report and a proposal to reopen one of the education system’s most sensitive debates: what inclusive schooling should look like after a decade under the current decree.

The education minister says the government wants to move from a climate of confrontation to a calmer, constructive discussion with unions and the wider school community. That conversation, she argues, must cover inclusive education, school segregation, excellence, teacher training and artificial intelligence. It will require commitment from more than the government, as well as the resources to support it.

The system must be inclusive and guarantee equal opportunities.

· Esther NiubóThe education minister rejects repealing Catalonia’s inclusive education decree.

Niubó rejects calls from secondary-school teachers to repeal the inclusive education decree. “The system must be inclusive and guarantee equal opportunities,” she says, while arguing that inclusion alone cannot carry the entire burden. She raises questions about how long newly arrived students should receive support outside mainstream classes, including whether students entering compulsory secondary education should spend four months learning the language before joining their year group.

If a child does not read in the third year of primary school, what do we have to do?

· Esther NiubóNiubó calls for discussion of student performance and teaching responses.

For Niubó, those choices involve more than language acquisition. They affect integration and social cohesion. She also asks what schools should do when a child still cannot read in the third year of primary school, saying the government will present student-performance results in November and look for “green shoots.”

The education budget has increased by 25%, but Niubó says further growth will be necessary to improve both excellence and equity. She also urges unions to change their tone, while acknowledging a crisis of legitimacy in representative forums. On the strike, the government says it must protect the right to protest, education and mobility, with as little disruption as possible. Niubó also describes the error that kept Catalonia out of PISA as damaging to the education system’s credibility and says it cannot happen again.

It would be important to change the tone in order to move forward.

· Esther NiubóShe urges education unions to shift from confrontation toward dialogue.
About this summary

Originally published by La Vanguardia in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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