The concerted action accumulates five years of siege with the lace of the Celaá law

The future Education Act has raised the concerted action of the whole country. The Valencian one, which accumulates vindictive experience after the arrival of the Botanic, has not been an exception. In the last five years, the premise of giving priority to public education has become a reality in a trickle of measures that have bypassed the sector or you’ve been directly harmed. The Lomloe, whose philosophy is in line with the Council’s strategy, is the last straw.

In June 2015 Vicent Marzà took office and the first thing he did was to promote meetings with the whole educational community. After the meeting with the school’s management, the reactions were positive: understanding and collaboration. In February of the following year everything had already gone to waste. The rupture was staged with the absence of the Education department in a festive Feceval event. The president of the School Council did attend, but on behalf of this body.

On the way, the Council had already taken steps. Annulled the agreements to build centres on public plots of land that the PP justified in that there was a demand – the two tenders that were put out to tender had been deserted, although one of the processes was corrected by the TSJCV;created the plan to provide free classrooms for two years to several Ceips -the concertada wanted to participate, since it helped to advance schooling and to build student loyalty-; and took the network out of the ministry program, then in the hands of the PP, to provide some schools with native English speaking assistants. Until then, it had been part of the programme, and although the Regional Ministry claimed that the state’s bases prevented its participation, it has not moved either since the programme was extended to all public schools with funds from the Generalitat. In other autonomous regions there are plans in this direction.

A common complaint of the concerted action – with the assistants and also with the training stays abroad, where their teachers can participate but with much less priority than the officials – is that the rules for promoting English in the classroom affect all schools, without distinction of ownership.

There has been no shortage of controversial statements over the years. From the famous “open bar” of concerts in Marzà to the words of Celaá, in a congress of the Catholic Schools, denying constitutional protection “in the strict sense” of freedom of choice of centre, despite the fact that there is legal doctrine to this effect. It also did not sit well with the Minister of Education defending subsidiarity in 2016, especially at post-compulsory levels, preparing the ground for what would come a few months later.

The biggest protest that the Botanist has experienced was called by a handful of affected schools for the loss of public funds for high school classrooms. The measure has also meant the most forceful judicial attack against the educational policy, leaving aside the linguistic question, whose model of promoting the Valencian language with incentives did not convince the network either, where Spanish is, as a rule, the majority. Going back to the concerts, the TSJCV annulled all the suppressions in the mentioned stage that were contested. The Supreme Court has confirmed two of these judgments, also recognizing the right to compensation.