31.01.2014 - 15:08
The Supreme Court of Justice of Catalonia is forcing five schools to offer one out of every four class hours in Spanish. In the five rulings handed down today, for the first time, the court specifies a specific percentage of language use in the classroom and demands that ‘a minimum use of Spanish must be guaranteed’. In response to the petitions of the families in five schools, the court ruled that the minimum amount of Spanish must be set at 25% of the class time, and that at least one major subject must be given in this language.
The ruling stems from a resolution of five cases in which various families had won rulings from the TSJC and the Supreme Court but complained that the Catalan Department of Education had not followed the dictated cautionary measures. The TSJC considers that Catalan must be the ‘center of gravity’ of the educational system but that Spanish, since the ruling was handed down against the Statute of Autonomy in 2010, must also be a language of instruction to a ‘reasonable’ measure.
The TSJC has issued five rulings for different families that demanded that the cautionary measures be put into place by the courts so that their children would be attended to in Spanish, without having to be separated from the rest of their classmates. The Catalan Government had appealed the cautionary measures and now the TSJC has upheld them.
In the ruling, the court heard the responses from the schools which describe their linguistic model. In some cases, the court admitted, the proportion of Spanish is already reasonable, but in others, apart from Spanish class, it’s only used for subjects like art. Therefore, the court is forcing the school directors to change their linguistic system in order to attend to the students who demand it, ‘as well as for their fellow students’.
That means that they won’t be able to separate out the students who want classes in Spanish nor will they be able to teach them individually, as they were doing up to now. The classes will be held in Spanish in the classroom of the student in question. In addition, the class has to be a major subject, like mathematics, geography, history or social studies, and correspond to at least 25% of the weekly class time, that is, six or seven hours each week.
