Three out of every four public schools do not have the reading plan that will be mandatory next academic year

BarcelonaKnowing how to read, reading to learn, and a love for reading. These are the three pillars on which, according to the Department of Education, the School Reading Plan (PLEC) must be based. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the plan that sets the didactic and organizational line that a school or institute must follow to ensure that students end up being good readers. At present, this organizational document is only a recommendation, and only about 700 of the little more than 2,500 public educational centers have a reading plan that meets the requirements set by the Generalitat. However, among the measures to reinforce learning announced by Minister Esther Niubó this week is, precisely, that the PLEC be mandatory. This implies that, for the coming school year, more than 1,800 public schools and institutes will have to create their reading plan from scratch or modify it to comply with this guideline.

"It seems like nonsense to want to do it all by next year when the training being provided on reading plans is practically non-existent," warns Joan Portell, doctor of language and literature didactics and professor of reading plans for the master's degree in school library and promotion of reading at the University of Barcelona (UB). "Creating a reading plan cannot be done overnight; it requires one, two, or three academic years with annual reviews and evaluations," insists Portell.

Doctor of linguistics and secondary school teacher Anna Llauradó also sees it as complicated for all centers to have a proper reading plan by the next school year: "In terms of documentation, it is feasible to have it, but implementing it and making it work is the question. In centers that have fewer difficulties with reading, it will be easier to make some adjustments to the reading plan they already have and obtain slightly better results, but where the complexity is severe, a document will hardly change the situation," she warns.

Llauradó welcomes "the urgency" with which the post-PISA shock is being treated and sees it as "positive" that an attempt has been made to create a "list of proposals on what needs to be done", but warns that solutions need time: "For the students who are now in I4, if things are done well, perhaps we can avoid this problem persisting, but if we think about the next PISA tests that the kids who are already in sixth grade or 1st year of secondary school (ESO) will take, we must be more cautious. It takes time to implement things well and the first thing we need is a well-conducted assessment".

Diagnosis

In fact, the department's instructions for drafting the PLEC already warn that "a good diagnosis will be needed." "We need a well-made description of what the current situation is regarding reading comprehension, and this is something we currently do not have. We do not have an accurate description of why children do not know how to read well," warns Llauradó. "It is information we need so that each center can design its own reading plan," he insists.

In this sense, Portell points out that this diagnosis must not only take into account the direct reading capacity of the students, but also their environment. "It is very different to have a diagnosis that says that children at home have parents who tell them stories, that the Three Kings give them books, and that they go to libraries, than a diagnosis that tells me that when children arrive home, there is no one there until eleven at night."

Portell explains that it is essential for the diagnosis to take into account the needs of certain children because, if not, "we find situations where in the same class there are children who reach the sixth grade of primary school with the reading level perfectly achieved and others who are three years behind." "This will, of course, affect them in secondary school (ESO)," warns the doctor from the UB. "Making the reading plan without this initial diagnosis is like playing the lottery; for it to work would be almost magic," insists Llauradó. Furthermore, he explains that this diagnosis should be repeated with a reading comprehension test at the beginning of each school year.

Collective reading

Once the diagnosis has been made, the reading plan must include didactic strategies to teach and encourage reading from 3-year-old preschool up to the second year of baccalaureate. On this point, Portell insists on the need to practice collective reading and warns that this does not mean the typical scene of reading a book aloud in class where each student is assigned a sentence. "This is the worst strategy one could think of, because you look at which sentence you get and forget the rest of the text, there is no comprehension," he warns.

The expert explains that a social perspective is needed regarding how reading is treated –reading a text, doing it aloud, performing it, looking for different genres, opening a debate with the students...– and which books are read. "The plan must contain the basic readings that every child should handle at a specific moment throughout their education. These basic readings will form a collective imagery, a recognition of a culture and a society that welcomes them and determines them," the doctor describes. He also opens the door for some of these works to be chosen by the students: "Teachers are one year older every year and the students are always the same age... In the end, I will never be up to date with the manga that is most successful," he admits.

One third of schools do not have a library

One of the key points in promoting reading in schools and institutes is having a school library. A facility that has been set aside in the last decade, but which has begun to be recovered in recent years. Even so, according to the latest data from the 2023-2024 academic year, 27% of public schools and institutes still do not have a library and, many of those that do have one, do not have a librarian.

"A library without a reading plan is crippled," warns the coordinator of the school library master's degree at the UB, Júlia Baena. At the same time, she describes how libraries and especially school librarians are a key point for promoting these plans. "It can be by organizing reading clubs that do not necessarily have to be facilitated by teachers, or by reviewing which readings are recommended and seeing if they need to be updated," Baena gives as an example. "We have found institutes where a book has been recommended for 20 years and nobody knows why," admits the former school librarian.