Education cancels postgraduate courses for improving mathematics and language skills for teachers before they even begin

BarcelonaGoodbye to one of the flagship measures that the Catalan government had announced to address the decline in educational outcomes in Catalonia. Just over a year ago, the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, announced that the department It would create three postgraduate programs to improve teachers' skills in mathematics and language.These are two of the subjects that cause the most concern in classrooms. Well, before these postgraduate courses could even begin—they were supposed to be available by July 2025—the Department of Education has decided to cancel them, as it has already stated in a publication. Official Gazette of the Government of Catalonia (DOGC). "Due to organizational and planning reasons stemming from the delay in formalizing the collaboration agreements necessary for its implementation, it is not possible to implement the program within the planned timeframe," states the resolution signed by the regional minister.

In fact, Jaume Franch, former dean of the UPC's Faculty of Mathematics and the slated coordinator of the mathematics postgraduate program announced by the regional government, told ARA that he learned of the project's cancellation when he saw it published in the DOGC, after all the work had already been completed. "We started working in September 2023 and finished the postgraduate curriculum in December 2023, because that's what they had asked us to do," Franch explained. The mathematician detailed that the initial plan was for the program to begin in July 2024, but "since the agreement wasn't finalized, everything was delayed." Franch also criticizes the fact that the publication in the DOGC (Official Gazette of the Generalitat of Catalonia) confirming the cancellation of the postgraduate programs that had not yet begun shows that the order to create the program was not issued until August 2025. This would have involved 900 teachers, "multiplying by five the number of professionals benefiting from the training." However, this training will have a much lower academic standing than a postgraduate degree, and the pilot program will go from an initial cost of €251,260 to a budget of €105,000, that is, less than half. "It will be training of a much lower level; we are talking about something considerably less and that would not even have postgraduate recognition, but rather will be like a short course with far fewer hours," Franch denounces. The department assures that the replacement of this pilot program "responds to a strategic decision aimed at improving the effectiveness, equity, and sustainability of the teacher training policy." They also argue that the new training will be structured in independent modules and will be hybrid in nature—combining in-person and virtual sessions—giving teachers greater flexibility to balance training with work and to adapt the training program "to their professional needs and time availability." With all this, they assert that the decision "significantly improves the impact, efficiency, and relevance of the training to the realities of the teaching profession." The new training programs will begin in the third term of this academic year and will be designed by the Institutes of Educational Sciences (ICE) of the universities, in coordination with CESIRE, the Generalitat's pedagogical resource center. Seven out of ten math teachers are not mathematicians.

Franch insists that the now-cancelled postgraduate program was "very necessary because nowadays many secondary and high school teachers are not mathematicians, and many of them have quite limited mathematical training." In fact, as reported by ARA, Seven out of ten secondary school math teachers are not mathematicians."Some of them are teachers who have, for example, a degree in business administration. This means that the last time they studied pure mathematics was in secondary school or, at most, in high school," warns the former dean of the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Barcelona. He insists: "It was essential that all these teachers, at the very least, have the opportunity to complete this postgraduate program to further their training and be able to provide adequate instruction to secondary and high school students."