26.06.2014 - 09:41
The plan of the Spanish government is to pay the sum of 6,057 euros to every child enrolling in private education because his or her family is not satisfied with the linguistic choices already available in the public system. Afterwards, Madrid will ask Catalonia to pay this money back.
Catalan Education Minister Irene Rigau warned that there are no private schools in Catalonia offering full education only in Spanish. “The move aims to create new offerings, it is not designed with current education choices in mind,” she said in an interview. “There is not a single private school in Catalonia that offers all classes in Spanish,” she warned.
According to the Catalan Minister, the Spanish Government “is not hiding” its intention to introduce “the Basque model” in Catalonia. In the Basque Country, there are schools that teach only in Spanish, bilingual schools, and schools that teach only in Basque. “Our model is different, we don’t separate pupils for language reasons,” Rigau said. “The final results at the end of compulsory education show pupils’ linguistic competence in both Spanish and Catalan,” she added.
Monetary compensation set
On Tuesday, Spain’s Minister of Education set the monetary compensation for families who wish to send their children to private schools in Catalonia which have Spanish as the language of instruction at 6,057 euros. Initially, the cost will come from the Ministry’s budget, but later it will be charged to the Catalan Government. José Ignacio Wert stated during the meeting of the Education committee, in the Spanish Congress, that he had decided to introduce “a reasonable, comparable measure of compensation, which is the cost of each student in the public school system”.
Just a few days ago, the Spanish State Council, which is the Spanish Government’s main advisory body, called on the Ministry of Education “to entirely reconsider” the decree in the Education Reform that obliges the Catalan Government to pay the private tuition of students who request to be taught in Spanish if that is not available through the public system. The top advisory body considered that the costs of the measure had not been seriously calculated and that limitations have not been included. The Catalan Minister for Education, Irene Rigau, appealed to the Spanish Ministry of Education to remove this provision from the new Reform. The latest disagreement is part of an ongoing conflict between the Spanish and the Catalan Governments regarding Catalan being the main language of instruction in schools.
Catalan Education Department says it’s an improvised decision
The Catalan Department of Education feels like the Spanish Education Minister’s new decision comes out of the blue. The Department says the ministry’s position “reveals a lack of knowledge about the reality of the country” both with respect to the territory and with respect to the use of languages here. In addition, the Department of Education recalls that this decree was supposed to be approved before the preinscription period, but that it is still pending.
