Educational centers in the Balearic Islands will have one month, starting this Saturday, to sign up for the pilot language choice plan that will be launched during the next academic year. Educational centers will be able to decide if they want mathematics and environmental knowledge subjects to be taught in Spanish or Catalan, although all centers will maintain the obligation that 50% of the subjects continue to be taught in Catalan.
The Minister of Education of the Balearic Islands, Antoni Vera, has explained that the centers that want to join this plan must meet a series of conditions, such as having adequate facilities for splitting in the classrooms between those who choose Spanish or Catalan. In order for centers to join the plan, they must guarantee a minimum of 20% of the students enrolled in one of the languages.
Public primary education centers will have to have the approval of the teaching staff to join the Voluntary Pilot Plan for Free Choice of Language, while in subsidized centers it will be the ownership of the center who decides. The voluntary pilot plan will begin to be applied in primary schools that request it during the next school year, while it will begin to be applied in secondary schools that request it in the 2025-2026 academic year.
The implementation of this plan responds to a demand from Vox to the Government of Marga Prohens, which has also had to allocate an additional 20 million euros to the Education budget to guarantee its application. However, the fact that its application is voluntary and that it is the centers and not the parents who decide whether or not there will be a choice of language has bothered the Prohens partners. Vox has already announced that it will be very vigilant because its objective is for parents, not educational centers, to decide the language in which their children study.
The plan has also set off alarms among the educational sector of the islands, which denounces that it will mean segregating students by their language, something that the Minister of Education denies. The Balearic Cultural Work has already announced that it will challenge this plan and the Collectives in defense of the language and culture of the Balearic Islands have called for a large mobilization on May 5 in Palma, coinciding with the end of Correllengua.
The Government of Marga Prohens insists that the language choice plan seeks to guarantee full communicative competence with equivalence in the two official languages. He insists that the fact that it is the centers who will decide whether to implement it or not will reinforce the autonomy of the center. It also defends that it will allow centers to be provided with additional means to acquire communicative competence in the Catalan and Spanish languages, apply evaluation and improvement instruments specific to the educational system and achieve success, educational equity and equal opportunities.
