The Government approved this Tuesday the new baccalaureate decree, which culminates the reform of the educational stages to adapt them to the law that came into force last year, the Lomloe, and to a new way of teaching based on competencies. With the new regulations, students will be able to finish high school with a failed subject if they meet a series of conditions.
The Secretary of State for Education, Alejandro Tiana, recalled on Monday in a meeting with the press that they want to copy the model of the universities, where a compensation board meets and debates whether a student who has the rest of the subjects passes the degree. surpassed. Tiana believes that a certain “autonomy” must be given to high school graduates, who are treated more as high school students than as pre-university students. “It is not that they save a subject, at all, but that under certain conditions they can compensate: when they have completed the subject, when they have achieved acceptable levels in general, when they have an average of more than five…”.
Bachelor’s degree in three years
The baccalaureate may be taken in three courses, exceptionally, instead of the usual two. In this way, he wants to facilitate the study of young elite athletes or artists with difficulties in combining their practice and books. Catalonia launched a pilot program last year.
The stage will have five modalities, instead of the current three, when the artistic branch is divided into two (one plastic and the other focused on music and the performing arts) and a new general baccalaureate has been created, with science and letters. The separation of the arts is an old claim by teachers and students, since theater has little in common with design. The general baccalaureate is designed, explained Tiana, for young people who want to study careers that touch different areas of knowledge, such as Tourism or Commerce, or a higher degree of FP in Early Childhood Education or Sound Technician, and do not want to go “to a specialization so big”. The Secretary of State gave an example of the prestigious International Baccalaureate (IB), implanted halfway around the world, also in Spain, where there are no modalities and the student follows his itinerary à la carte. Tiana believes that its implementation will be “gradual”, but that it will not entail much difficulty in centers that already have a branch of letters and sciences. It is the autonomies that decide which modalities are taught in each center.
The new curriculum, which will be implemented in September in the first year of high school and a year later in the second year, also incorporates seven subjects (four of them designed for the general modality). History of Spain, which covered from prehistory in a single high school course, will focus on the contemporary age. “History is studied by all students at all levels, and in high school a student needs to know how history is constructed, and for that it is impossible if you have to study I don’t know how many centuries. In other countries it is done the same. In France it has been studied since World War II, in others only the 20th century…”, recalled Tiana.
But the most important thing is that it aspires to profoundly change the way of learning, moving from a model based on students being able to repeat content in an exam to another that tests their ability to apply the knowledge acquired and relate them to each other. . The new approach, called competence, will lead to a different Selectivity, more similar to the Pisa Report exams, the test that the OECD regularly performs in dozens of countries (79, in 2018).
teacher recycling
Faced with so many changes, the unions demand recycling for teachers, and Tiana agrees: “We are aware of the need for permanent training, which is included in the law as a right and a duty of teachers. Although it is the responsibility of the communities, from the ministry we are launching territorial cooperation programs with the autonomous communities in some fields, such as digitization, but not exclusively. Not only will there be courses, but collaboration networks will be created between centers “so that they can learn from each other on visits, even from different communities,” said the Secretary of State. In addition, some regions have created the figure of curricular tutors “to support management teams in the changes that need to be made”, although Tiana praised that many centers already have “their own initiatives for a long time that are very interesting”.
The documents prepared by the Ministry of Education and approved by the Council of Ministers, called Minimum Education, must now be completed by each autonomous community (those that have a co-official language will decide 50% of the curriculum, and those that do not, 40% ) passing their own decrees. And they will have to hurry because there are five months left for them to start applying. Tiana insisted that they have worked in a “collaborative way” with the regional governments “for more than a year”, and the proof is that several regions will present the drafts of their curricula in a short time. In his opinion, these are going to be more similar to each other than those of the previous law, the Lomce, since in that case the communities had total freedom in the development of the optional subjects and this has led to the stamps “having published more textbooks than ever. Tiana believes that content differences will always exist between centers “from one street to another”, but that the important thing is that this does not create inequality.
As for Religion, the new text detracts from its relevance by establishing that the grades obtained in the subject will not count when it comes to extracting “the average grade for the purposes of access to the university or in the calls to obtain scholarships and aid for the study in which the academic records must be entered into concurrence”.
The following keys can help to better understand the educational reform of this stage of Baccalaureate.

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