Minister Anna Simó appeared before the press seven days after the PISA report was released, which has made citizens concerned about the educational quality of the Catalan system. In her appearance, the counselor assured that the poor results in Catalonia do not reflect all the measures that her department began to introduce last year to reverse the trend. In this sense, he asked the educational community, families and political parties - in clear reference to the opposition to the Government - to "stand together" with the department to support the current measures and those that will be presented to the Parliament in January and to the School Council. in successive meetings, to improve education in the long term.
Simó ratified his full confidence in his right-hand man in the department, Ignasi Garcia-Plata, appointed secretary of Educational Transformation in September, one of the few members of the department who has not inherited from the previous councilor. Garcia-Plata has been the center of criticism these days for not appearing beyond Tuesday to offer more explanations about the Government's response to the poor results in PISA. "García-Plata is not the problem, he is part of the solution," he added.
On the other hand, it has pointed to changes in the Consell Superior d'Avaluació, the body that prepares and coordinates internal and external evaluation tests, such as PISA. The councilor has considered of great importance the role that the evaluation of the measures implemented, which until now was null, will have. For this reason, she wants to deploy a mandate of the education law (LEC) such as the constitution of the Education Evaluation and Prospecting Agency, an independent body of the department that will measure the impact of each measure carried out. "We need evidence and to know what works and what doesn't," explained the counselor. The agency will be established in January, although the decree that regulates it will not be published until June 2024.
The OECD report places the students' scores in the three areas of knowledge (mathematics, reading and science) below both the Spanish average, the OECD average and the European Union average. These are the worst scores since Catalonia evaluated in PISA and after leading the best positions at the state level in the past.
In mathematics, performance has fallen 24 points in a decade, which is equivalent to more than one academic year. In reading, the setback is almost two school years.
On Tuesday, December 5, the same day they were published, the Secretary of Educational Policies, Ignasi Garcia-Plata, and the General Director of Innovation, Research and Digital Culture, Joan Cuevas, analyzed the results. They attributed the worsening to the increase in the immigrant population and criticized the overrepresentation of the sample of foreign students (24% according to PISA, 14.9% according to the Generalitat). Educació rectified the next day, admitting the quality and rigor of the tests and that the sample was representative of the school community.
After the rectification, the councilor attributed the problem to child poverty. She posted a message on the social network X: "There are no excuses. We have a problem that we have identified and that we are working to solve. This is about child poverty and school segregation." She also gave an interview to a public television channel with the same message.
However, in the following days, starting with the first holiday, the media have tried to find experts to explain the causes of the debacle, a situation of great complexity, which contains a multitude of nuances in light of the responses and hypotheses of the academics . In any case, the analysis of the data has been left to the mercy of diverse opinions, some more expert than others, but without the clarity of the educational administration, the only one that can make a diagnosis and point out the actions that will define the change of course.
Only the voice of the number four of the department has been heard, the general director Joan Cuevas, who has added a certain relaxation in the learning of reading to the social situation of the composition of the students (reading comprehension drops almost two years compared to ten years ago). years).
