The TSJC rules again against Catalan in schools, but ruffles the feathers of Bilingual School

BarcelonaNew blow from justice to Catalan in schools. This Monday, the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has ordered the execution of the ruling it issued last September, in which it annulled a dozen articles of the decree to protect Catalan in schools. A decree approved by the government of Pere Aragonès and just a month later it was suspended by the courts; therefore, it was no longer being applied in schools. Sources from the Department of Education have assured that the resolution will not entail any change in the day-to-day of Catalan schools.

The court has made the decision –which is not final– and has upheld the petition filed by the Assembly for a Bilingual School of Catalonia (AEB) in which it requested that the ruling be enforced, despite the fact that various parties such as Plataforma per la Llengua or the Government of the Generalitat itself announced that they would file an appeal. However, in the resolution, the magistrates also reprimand the AEB for a series of requests that the court has dismissed.

The TSJC states that several requests made by the AEB are "completely unrelated" to the debate of the ruling and that it is not its function to order the Generalitat to issue general instructions. The court goes on to warn the Bilingual School that it cannot, "in view of a not-yet-final, partially upheld ruling, design a system of control of the Generalitat through the courts, so that the courts impose obligations on the Generalitat beyond the jurisdictional procedure and on aspects that have not been debated or questioned".

In fact, in various responses to requests from the AEB, the magistrates insist that they are being asked to perform a task that does not correspond to them and assure that the administration is already complying with the execution of the ruling issued by the TSJC. "We reiterate that the ruling is merely declarative and the Administration complies with the execution through the non-application of the provisions provisionally annulled by the ruling, without this court being able to demand the preparation of a report on the elaboration of instructions requested by the enforcing party and which are not part of the present procedure".

The decision does not affect schools

Beyond the warnings to Escuela Bilingüe, with Monday's ruling the TSJC orders the total or partial annulment of eleven articles that established Catalan and Aranese as normally vehicular and learning languages and as usual languages in teaching and administrative activities, in relations with families, in teaching materials and evaluations. However, from Education they insist that "the provisional execution of the ruling does not alter the ordinary activity of the educational centers", and they assure that the rules for the organization and management of the centers continue "fully in force, including the criteria for linguistic use". In fact, Education repeats that the decree in question "was already provisionally suspended and had not been applied to the 2025-2026 academic year".

Although it will not have a direct impact on classrooms, the Department of Education had already filed an appeal for cassation before the Supreme Court against the TSJC ruling. In this regard, sources from Education insist that the current regulatory framework "provides full legal certainty" to the centers and linguistic projects. In this way, they assure that Catalan –and Aranese in the Aran– remains as the vehicular language and, at the same time, the system "ensures an adequate presence of Spanish as a curricular language".