Supreme Court leaves language immersion in Catalonia hanging by a thread

BarcelonaNew judicial blow to the system of linguistic immersion in Catalan schools. Catalan Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray and Culture minister Natàlia Garriga appeared to assess the Supreme Court's ruling on the use of Catalan in the classroom.

Gonzàlez-Cambray explained that the Supreme Court has rejected the Catalan government's appeal against the Catalan High Court ruling that made it compulsory for 25% of classes to be in Spanish. This resolution, issued a year ago, establishes that "all students receive effectively and immediately" the new model of linguistic teaching. In practice, the judicial decision meant that, in addition to Spanish, at least one more core subject must be taught in this language. To avoid this, the Government filed an appeal in cassation, which is the one that has now been rejected by the Supreme Court, leaving the immersion model hanging by a thread, awaiting the final ruling.

"The immersion model is built on a very broad social, sociological and political model and this has been reflected throughout all these years", said the conseller who added that this system "guarantees that at the end of the compulsory stage all students master both Catalan and Spanish, as demonstrated by the results of basic competency tests". "This is a frontal blow to the model," Gonzàlez-Cambray insisted .

Less than half of teachers routinely use Catalan to address their entire classroom