The evaluation and promotion decree that the Government is expected to approve soon eliminates the recovery exams in Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) from this course. The norm does maintain said call, on the other hand, for the Baccalaureate.

The recovery tests, which were traditionally in September and the communities have tended to move to June, disappear in the framework of a profound change in the system that regulates how to pass the course and obtain official titles. As already established by the new educational law, the Lomloe, the draft decree provides that the repetition of the course is no longer directly linked to the fact of having failed a certain number of subjects, but to what the student’s team of teachers considers, together, which will be better for their academic evolution. The draft rule also states that reinforcements for students who are doing poorly should be given “as soon as difficulties are detected.” In this new context, the importance of being able to recover subjects in an extraordinary call to avoid repeating the course loses much of its relevance.

The text does not contemplate extraordinary recovery tests in ESO, but neither does it expressly prevent the communities, or the centers themselves in application of their autonomy, from establishing them. Asked if they will be able to do it, the ministry limits itself to pointing out for the moment that the drafts are not yet finished. The Balearic Islands, where the Socialists govern, has already communicated to the educational centers that the extraordinary call disappears so that they can organize the course without counting on it, according to what the local newspaper has reported. Last minute. If the draft remains as it is, the Valencian Community will also remove these tests, say sources from the Generalitat, who believe that the withdrawal will also be generalized in all territories.

The new decree emphasizes, like the education law, that repetition must be an exceptional measure. This responds to the verification that, as the OECD has been insisting, repeating a course is an ineffective and expensive measure for educational systems (especially for Spain, where 28.7% of 15-year-old students have repeated at least once, almost triple the average for developed countries). The Government’s forecast is that the funds that are not used to make students repeat are allocated to reinforcement programs, which according to most experts are more effective for the educational progress of students.

Article 9.5 of the draft of the new decree states, in reference to ESO: “Decisions on promotion and graduation will be adopted collegially by the teaching team after a call for evaluation that will take place at the end of the school year.” The evaluation decree approved in 2014 by the PP, and which will now be repealed, foresaw, for its part, the holding of “extraordinary tests” for “the recovery of subjects with negative evaluation”.

Sources from the Ministry of Education assure that the change was transferred to the autonomous communities during the process of elaboration of the decree (whose public hearing process has concluded) and they “did not express disagreement.” The same sources add that, although it is not foreseeable, some nuance of the draft decree could change before it is published.

The extraordinary call does continue in Baccalaureate, where the number of failures will continue to be key to being able to obtain the title. In principle, the students will have to pass all of them, although the draft contemplates that the teaching team can decide to give it to them with a pending subject, as long as the student meets a series of conditions, such as not having missed class, having an average grade above the approved and have taken the subject exams.

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