First day of renewed teachers’ protests against changes to curriculum and academic year
Education unions cut off traffic in Barcelona and other cities as part of partial strike
Teachers’ unions held a partial strike on Tuesday, from 8 am to 10 am, as part of renewed protest efforts against unpopular changes to the curriculum and academic year, which will start earlier than usual next September.
Another 2-hour strike will be held on June 2, while May 25 and June 9 will see teachers halt their activity all day long.
In Barcelona, education sector workers briefly cut off traffic on Gran Via, a major street that cuts across the city, as well as the Ronda Litoral ring road.
“It’s not about losing 5 vacation days!” they chanted. “It’s about 10 years of budget cuts!”
Teachers from the Santiago Sobrequés school in Girona, meanwhile, set up a classroom in the middle of the street and held both Catalan language and physical education classes.
“We wanted to take our protest to the streets,” Joan Boada, a teacher, told the Catalan News Agency.
What are these protests about?
Catalan education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray announced that the academic year would begin in early September, a week earlier than usual.
Although the government believes making summer vacation – “one of the longest in Europe” – shorter will be positive for students, teachers’ unions claim they were not consulted and that the education department “has not shown any interest in negotiating.”
Beyond this, changes were also announced to the curriculum, including reducing hours of instruction for certain subjects, a greater focus on language learning and the development of technological skills, as well as modifications to the grading scale.
And while Cambray stated that schools will not have to implement curriculum changes in September if they do not want to, this has not been enough to appease unions.
Teachers are also against imposing a Supreme Court ruling that calls for 25% of all lessons to be taught in Spanish, thus putting the Catalan language immersion system at risk.
Strikes in March
The education sector already held a five-day strike in March. Unions also called for demonstrations, with the first one attracting 22,000 protesters.
Although the demonstrations were peaceful, the education department spoke out against them.
One of these protests took place at the education sector fair in Barcelona, where several teachers and students prevented Gonzàlez-Cambray from kicking off the event.