Isabel Celaá defends the "general promotion" and says that the students will not fail the third quarter

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Students will pass to the next course in a general way. The evaluation of the third trimester will only serve to make a diagnosis and will not have a negative impact on your final grade. If anything, it will serve to recover the other two previous ones. Each autonomous community will decide on its own the number of suspensions with which the students can obtain the degree and whether or not they advance the agenda or reduce or not content from now on.

These are some of the measures agreed this Wednesday between the minister Isabel Celaá and the autonomous communities in the Sectorial Conference on Education to close this unprecedented course due to the closing of classrooms due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Government insists that it is not a general pass because the next year the students will have to recover what they have not passed, but the Minister of Education in Madrid, Enrique Ossorio, points out that the agreed solutions are too benevolent: « They are going in the wrong direction and some autonomous community could be tempted to do it [the general approval] ».

The document with the measures that will lead to a ministerial order - from the Ministry of Health, which is now in charge - has been approved by most of the regions, but Madrid did not endorse it. This region does not share the proposal that the third evaluation should only be diagnostic. This means that the final grades will only value the first two quarters, in which a face-to-face class has been taught. No one will fail in this third evaluation. Clearer: no student can suspend for what they study from now on. Furthermore, it will serve to clean up previous bad grades and will recover previous quarters if they have been suspended.

Celaá's words have been: "That this third trimester is not a disadvantage for any student, which serves, in any case, to benefit them, to make up the first two trimesters. The third trimester has to be computed in a positive way, it cannot be computed negatively. "

During the meeting, the Ministry proposed replacing the "academic" character of this third evaluation with the "formative" one. "To reduce the evaluation to its diagnostic or formative value is to devalue the concept of evaluation," Ossorio has denounced.

There are more measures that will bring problems. Celaá defended this morning in Congress that the "general rule" will be automatic promotion and the "exception" will be to repeat. This, in practice, implies that the Autonomous Communities will be able to "relax" the criteria for obtaining ESO, Bachillerato or FP degrees "based on the student's evolution in all the subjects and their academic maturity", a criterion all lights arbitrary that translates, according to some advisers, in being able to take the title with suspended subjects. Each region can "adapt the criteria" and do it in its own way.

Although, since the norm now is that there is a "general promotion", the teaching teams must justify in a "very solidly argued" way why they want a student to repeat. They must provide an individualized report that justifies it. "The degree must be the usual practice," said Celaá. When asked if the Selectivity could be done with failed subjects, he slipped away: "We are not talking about failed or pass subjects, we are talking about a continuous, global evaluation. Everything that cannot be worked on at the end of this course will be worked on the following " And the students who go to university?

On the other hand, the Government and the CCAA agreed to open the schools in July to give reinforcement classes on core subjects (Language, Mathematics, Science, Foreign Language) to students with educational needs, as claimed by some organizations such as Save the Children. It will be compulsory for the CCAA and voluntary choice for students.

The idea will be to make a reinforcement plan but without advancing on the agenda, a kind of mix between PROA and the autonomous plans that Andalusia, Castilla y León or Catalonia have, which already open the classrooms after school hours to help the laggards.

This does not mean that the course extends beyond June, Celaá has warned, explaining that the reinforcement activities will be combined with "leisure and free time" activities. The teachers unions are very critical of this measure and demand that the teachers who teach these classes are not the same ones who work throughout the course, something that the Government and the CCAA agree to. They will be monitors or interns outside the centers. The counselors asked the Ministry for additional financial resources "because it would be made with additional payments to the teaching staff."

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• Education
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