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.

In order to obtain the degree with a failing, the student must meet several conditions: that the teaching team consider that they have achieved the objectives of the stage; not having missed class in a “continuous and unjustified” manner; have taken the exams of the subject not passed, including the extraordinary call, and that their average grade reaches at least five. Studying the baccalaureate in three courses will also require meeting a series of requirements. Read the full news by clicking on this link

Of the seven new subjects, four belong to the general baccalaureate. These are general Mathematics (oriented towards problem solving and information analysis, with “special attention to non-mathematical contexts”); General sciences; Cultural and Artistic Movements; and Economy, entrepreneurship and business activity. In this link you can consult how the 42 subjects will be

The new curriculum changes an encyclopedic model for another that describes what kind of skills students should have acquired. The contents are expressed in a more open way, giving margin to the centers and teachers to specify them according to their students. The university entrance exam must change to adapt. The ministry is already working on it. More details, clicking on this link

Miguel Soler is one of the experts who has developed the new curriculum. Valencian Autonomous Secretary of Education, Soler defends change in this interview. “Competence-based learning aims to assimilate and have enough memory to be able to solve problems in the future and respond to new situations thanks to the knowledge you have acquired.” Read the full interview here

So that the curricula are complete and can be applied in September, the autonomous communities must still approve their part. The slowness of the process generates concern in schools and especially in institutes: students do not know what types of baccalaureate will be in their institute and directors fear that the slowness will increase disaffection among teachers. Read the full story at this link

Philosophy does not disappear from the institutes. In high school, in fact, it gains weight by going from a compulsory subject (in the first year) and an elective (in the second year), to two compulsory subjects (one in each course). In ESO, on the other hand, Education did not include it in the list of subjects that the institutes had to offer on a mandatory basis, but allowed the autonomies to add it, and almost all of them have said that they will. Read the rest of the changes in the matter by clicking on this link

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