Three out of every four public schools do not have the reading plan that will be mandatory next school 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, in other words, 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 the moment, 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, making the PLEC mandatory. This implies that, for the coming academic 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 directive.

"It seems like nonsense to want to do everything by next year when the training being provided on reading plans is practically non-existent," warns Joan Portell, doctor in language and literature didactics and professor of reading plans for the master's degree in school libraries and reading promotion 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 in linguistics and secondary school teacher Anna Llauradó also sees it as complicated for all centers to have a proper reading plan by next year: "In terms of documentation, it is feasible to have it, but implementing it and making it work is the big 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 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 will be taken by children who are already in sixth grade or 1st year of secondary school, we must be more cautious. It takes time to implement things well and the first thing we need is a well-done diagnosis".

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 do not currently 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 students' direct reading ability, 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 Wise Men 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 ourselves in 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 grades behind." "This will, of course, affect them in secondary school," warns the UB doctor. "Creating 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 is made, the reading plan must include didactic strategies to teach and promote reading from preschool (age 3) to the second year of high school. 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 possibly 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 on how reading is approached – reading a text, doing it aloud, dramatizing 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 certain moment throughout their education. These basic readings will form a collective imaginary, a recognition of a culture and a society that welcomes and determines them," the doctor describes. He also opens the door for some of these works to be chosen by the students: "Every year we teachers are one year older 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 in the last decade has been sidelined, but which in recent years has begun to be recovered. 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, 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 precisely libraries and especially school librarians are a key point to promote these plans. "It can be by organizing book clubs that don't 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 no one knows why," admits the former school librarian.