"It's crazy": Schools warn they were unaware they must conduct oral exams before May 20.
Educació defends that a document was published in June specifying that all centers had to pass the exams
BarcelonaA new chapter in the mess with oral expression tests in Catalan schools. Last year, the ERC government went from communicate that exceptionally they would not be done "due to work overload" which meant for the centers to ask, 24 hours later, in the Higher Evaluation Council to maintain the exams. Finally, the chaos was resolved with a compromise: all schools would receive oral expression tests in Catalan and Spanish for 6th grade primary school students and 4th year secondary school students to take. but Educació would only ask for the results from specific centers, so the rest had a more flexible timeframe to take the tests and were not required to submit their results.
Given this scenario, many schools and institutes assumed this dynamic would continue for the 2024-2025 academic year. However, in recent weeks, thanks to a reminder from the Department of Education, they have seen that this year all centers must conduct oral expression tests for 6th grade and 4th grade. Several teachers, schools and institutes, and sources from the USTEC union explained to ARA that they were unaware of this time limit and that they were required to give students these tests. They claim they found out at the end of April, which leaves them with very little time to maneuver.
Sources from the Department of Education explain that the calendar for the application of the oral tests is published in the Documents for the organization and management of the centers (DOIGC) for the 2024-2025 academic year and that this documentation was posted in June 2024. In addition, they detail that the Evaluation Agency that the tests had to be applied to the board of directors on March 13. On the other hand, the change was also reflected in a resolution of the Official Journal of the Generalitat of Catalonia (DOGC) on March 31st of this year.
"They have no right to tell us this with such short notice and almost at the end of the school year, which is when there is the most work," criticizes one of the Catalan teachers at one of the schools who was unaware of the time limit and is already organizing their hours for the coming weeks to accommodate the tests, which last one week.
Teachers warn that the schedules are very tight, since after these students passed the basic skills tests a few weeks ago, now the oral expression tests coincide with the diagnostic tests that all students in 4th grade of primary school and 2nd year of compulsory secondary education must also take. "It's crazy," says a literature teacher at a high school in Barcelona, who complains that she learned of the change "from one day to the next."
Overloaded hours
The first academic year in which oral expression tests were administered in the Catalan education system was in 2023-2024. At that time, Catalan oral exams were implemented, which were taken by 160,000 students. It was also decided that a representative sample of almost 8,000 students would also take oral tests in Spanish and English. In all languages except English, the test consisted of two parts: one in which the student had to answer questions on a specific topic, and a second in which they had to interact aloud with a classmate to plan a specific task. In total, fifteen minutes of the test were taken by the teachers themselves, and which, at the time, amounted toa work overload of 20,000 hours for all teachers in the education system.