Catalan parents organise: “My daughter can’t add or subtract”

Catalonia sinks in PISA as families organise against the collapse

Dori Huertas has five children and all have gone through the same state school in a middle-class neighbourhood of Barcelona. The four eldest — one doing a doctorate in Particle Physics at CERN, another with a master's in Industrial Engineering, one studying Nursing — were educated under the LOE and Lomce (Spanish education laws). The youngest, aged seven, is in the second year of primary under the Lomloe, the ley Celaá (Celaá law). The comparison made by this Molecular Biology PhD linked to the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) leaves little room for doubt: the older ones read, went to museums and combined theory and practice, while the youngest “if I don’t teach her, she only just learns to read and do sums”. Her complaint is the one summed up by the news headline: “My daughter can’t add or subtract in the third year of primary school.”

What has changed at school between one generation and the next

In the youngest daughter's classroom, textbooks, exercise books and a good part of the subjects have disappeared. There are no exams; assessment is by rubrics. Pupils sit at round tables, which according to this mother means that half the time part of the class has its back to the teacher. Everything, they say, is experiential. The example that sums up the method: in the first year of primary they spent the whole year working on a project about jellyfish. At the youngest girl's school only English, Physical Education, Values and Music survive; the rest is grouped into Areas, Projects, Spaces or Classroom Moments.

The PISA collapse: 23 points in Maths and 38 in Reading

The data back up the complaint. In a decade, Catalonia has gone from being among the best regions in Maths and Reading to falling to the bottom, on a par with Extremadura and the Canary Islands. In Maths, 15-year-old pupils have fallen back 23 points, the equivalent of a school year; in Reading, 38 points, almost two school years. In the PIRLS 2021 report, which measures reading comprehension at age 10, it is the region that lags furthest behind. And in the internal tests of the Generalitat (Catalan government), one in four pupils in the fourth year of ESO (compulsory secondary education) failed Maths, with the lowest level in a decade in Spanish Language and Catalan Language.

From four hours of Maths to “Classroom Moments”

The timetable illustrates the shift. In the fifth year of primary, 2013/2014 school year, there was half an hour of Reading daily and four weekly hours of Maths, with traditional subjects. In the same year group in 2023/2024, subjects are grouped into Classroom Moments and Learning Spaces, with Maths reinforcement through an app. Some argue that this globalised approach dilutes subjects and that, at those ages, it doesn't work. Former Catalan Education Minister Irene Rigau herself summed it up: “Sustainability, climate change, feminism... are all very well, but if we have to take it out of Language and Maths hours, we’re not on the right track.”

From 20 families at the gate to 800 organised

The platform chaired by Dori Huertas was born out of a group of 20 families complaining at the school gate. Today they number 800 families and on Change.org they have gathered 2,300 signatures to ask the Govern (Catalan government) to stop applying “experiments without guarantees” and not to empty schools of academic content. The trigger, they admit, was the publication of the PISA results. The platform looks to France, which after its poor marks has announced a return to dictation, and to Finland, which is going to increase Language and Maths hours after finding that its model was not delivering the expected results.

The official response and the noise of the debate

The Generalitat has blamed the poor results on the pandemic and on an alleged “overrepresentation” of pupils of immigrant origin, and has launched an emergency plan that includes kits with tangrams and ropes for more hands-on Maths. Part of the debate shifts the focus to the schooling of newly arrived pupils or to cultural grievances that have little to do with the level of Maths. Some also claim that teachers act as mere carers while parents work. The ball, in any case, remains in the administration's court.

The disconcerting fact doesn't make the headlines: Dori's youngest daughter, aged seven, is still in the second year of primary while her mother teaches her at home what the school, she says, no longer teaches her. And Catalonia remains at the bottom in PIRLS at age 10. No one has yet explained how that can be turned around with a kit of ropes.