The People's Party (PP) will reject Vox's attempt to amend the Education Law: "It undermines the Minimum Decree."

PalmPP front page on Vox's attempt to amend the Education Law to include Spanish as a teaching language. Just hours after the party submitted its proposal for registration, the PP announced that it will not allow it to be processed. "It has nothing to do with what was agreed upon," said the party's spokesperson in Parliament, Sebastià Sagreras: "They're destroying the Minimum Decree."

"We will vote against the acceptance of this bill proposed by Vox," Sagreras insisted. "They have presented it unilaterally," he explained. In this sense, he considered that Vox's proposal "crosses some of the PP's red lines," and recalled that the budget agreement was limited to including the vehicular use of Spanish in the law. However, he did not clarify whether they will make a counterproposal to Vox.

The amendment to the law proposed by Vox establishes that "a multilingual system be established in schools with the Spanish language as its backbone, along with Catalan, as the islands' own languages." In this sense, it modifies Article 135 of the Education Law, which currently states that "Catalan will be the language of teaching and learning used for at least half of school hours, to ensure the achievement of the objectives of linguistic normalization." In the Spanish language, it is defined as the "language of teaching and learning" that "may also be used by each educational center upon approval of its language project, especially when deemed necessary to guarantee full and equivalent communicative competence in both official languages." With Vox's modification, the regulation establishes that "Spanish and Catalan will be the languages of teaching and learning," and both "will be used in a balanced and equal proportion" in language projects. "The conditions for the use of languages in educational centers will be developed in accordance with a bilingualism marked by the co-official status of both languages," it continues.

Furthermore, Vox adds a clause to the law allowing legal guardians to "exercise their right" to choose the language of primary education for students "at the time of enrollment in the fourth year of preschool or, exceptionally, in the first cycle of primary education." "Publicly funded educational centers must offer the option of selecting the language of primary education during the enrollment process," the text emphasizes. It also modifies a clause in the law to allow "flexible groupings based on the language chosen by families," while the law currently establishes "no separation into different centers and class groups for reasons of language." This change could open the door to linguistic segregation of students based on their language in the classroom.

Control of language projects

At the same time, Vox is demanding that the educational authorities establish "a system for evaluating school language projects, under the supervision of the educational inspectorate, that will allow for their periodic review and adaptation to ensure compliance with the distribution of official language use established by regulations." Furthermore, it establishes that the Government must establish requirements for accreditation of Spanish language proficiency for teaching in the Canary Islands, although this is a state responsibility.

Vox spokesperson Manuela Cañadas maintained in the statement (released only in Spanish) the party's position that "Spanish is excluded from the classroom." "We cannot talk about freedom while the language common to all Spaniards is marginalized," she stated. "This law paves the way toward the ultimate goal: the free choice of language," she concluded.