The Government will be vigilant so that the 12 communities that are now governed by the PP do not slip away and apply the Celaá Law. Through the PSOE, he has sent a warning message to some territories where 70% of Spanish students study so that they fully comply with his educational reform. “Everyone has to comply with the law,” he warns.
“We are going to be in contact with all the federations so that we can verify that Lomloe, the law that was democratically approved by the Cortes Generales, is evidently implemented in every corner of our country, exerts its positive effects and, therefore, that no one dissuades compliance with the legislation,” said the deputy general secretary of the party and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, at a press conference at the Ferraz headquarters on Monday.
Number two has thus disavowed the attempt of the popular regional executives to try to “minimize” the most conflictive points of the new norm. “This is something very important because, as you know, sometimes we hear a comment from a president or some territorial leader that there is not much in this direction in which the law everyone has to comply with, much more so the educational community and the authorities in charge of the Ministries of Education, who are the reference for the legislation to make its way,” he added.
Thus it picks up the gauntlet thrown by the PP, which, according to EL MUNDO, is going to take advantage of the fact that education is a competence transferred to the autonomies to, using all legal loopholes, and putting itself on the edge of the norm but without breaking it, will lower the impact on students of the most “ideological” Government measures.
The PP’s strategy involves exercising rebellion through three paths. On the one hand, several Autonomous Communities are approving regional regulations that counter-program the Lomloe or are using their curricular developments to amend this law. On the other hand, they are going to form a common front in the Education Sector Conference to prevent the minister, Pilar Alegría, from approving the regulations that she has pending to submit for consultation to this body, where a good part of the educational decisions are voted on. In addition, they will assert their absolute majority in the Senate to slow down possible educational initiatives.
In this way, it seeks to neutralize the strategy of the PSOE-Unidas Podemos coalition government in relation to passing the course and obtaining the title without limit of failures in ESO (several CCAA of the PP have placed limitations on this open bar), limit the growth of the charter school (they are going to recover the single district and finance private education from 0 to 3 years) or reduce the contents that students study (the study of the entire History of Spain is reinforced and not just contemporary history and insists on the great works of the history of literature, such as Don Quixote or La Celestina).
The rope is going to be tightened because, in addition to the PP having the regional majority after the 28-M elections, there are now six communities where this party governs with Vox (Valencian Community, Extremadura, Aragón, Castilla y León and Murcia) or, As in the Balearic Islands, a pact for investiture has been signed. The demands of Santiago Abascal’s training in educational matters force the popular ones not to move away from their fundamental principles in educational matters: freedom of choice of center, freedom of choice of language and recognition of the right that parents have to educate their children in accordance with their convictions, all of which is included in article 27 of the Constitution.
It is expected that future frictions between the Government and the CCAA of the PP or PP-Vox will concentrate on the parental pin, which would allow in the Balearic Islands, the Valencian Community and Aragon that parents can previously authorize the LGTBI workshops taught in schools . There the key to the controversy is whether these talks take place within school hours and within the curriculum or are done outside, as extracurricular activities. The PP-Vox agreements speak in principle of “extracurricular” activities but we will have to see how this is specified in the regulations.
It also remains to be seen how the Ministry of Education will deal with the recovery of the single district in Madrid, Murcia and the Valencian Community, since the Celaá Law is contrary to parents being able to enroll their children anywhere in the city, advocating, for on the contrary, by proximity schooling.
The protection of Spanish in communities with a co-official language will also be a matter of controversy. The Valencian Community is preparing a new law so that families can choose the vehicular language of schools and the Balearic Islands will also allow families to choose the first language of schooling, a right that will later be extended to the rest of the educational stages.
Madrid, Galicia, Andalusia, Cantabria, La Rioja and the Canary Islands (where the Canary Islands Coalition governs with the PP) will be the rest of the regions where the socialists will supervise that Lomloe reaches the classrooms.