“Always juggling”

Open­ing the door of a class­room, whether in pri­mary or sec­ondary school, pro­vides a re­flec­tion of the di­ver­sity that char­ac­terises today’s so­ci­ety and you have to adapt to it. Peo­ple don’t re­alise how much work and headaches this en­tails. We are con­stantly jug­gling,” ex­plains Salva Cervera, a teacher at the Fer­rer i Guàrdia sec­ondary school in Sant Joan Despí. A high ratio of stu­dents from un­favourable so­cioe­co­nomic sit­u­a­tions, chil­dren in need of in­ten­sive ed­u­ca­tional sup­port (autism spec­trum dis­or­ders, be­hav­ioural dis­or­ders, dis­abil­i­ties, etc.) and var­i­ous in­di­vid­u­alised plans, whether due to at­ten­tion deficit, dyslexia, lack of knowl­edge of the lan­guage or di­ver­sity of all kinds. A class pro­file that is made up with the rest of the stu­dents, who also have their own pace of learn­ing and ac­quire knowl­edge fol­low­ing a cur­ricu­lum with spe­cific con­tents and through di­verse method­olo­gies. An ed­u­ca­tion that may have be­come ob­so­lete and should be adapted to 21st-cen­tury stu­dents. And in the midst of all this, teach­ers who see how their work, which the vast ma­jor­ity con­sider un­der­val­ued and ques­tioned, is once again at the cen­tre of the umpteenth po­lit­i­cal and media de­bate fol­low­ing the lat­est re­sults of the PISA (Pro­gramme for In­ter­na­tional Stu­dent As­sess­ment) tests, which have placed the Cata­lan ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem at the tail end of those of Spain and below the av­er­age of OECD (Or­gan­i­sa­tion for Eco­nomic Co­op­er­a­tion and De­vel­op­ment) coun­tries.

It seems that every­one has an opin­ion on ed­u­ca­tion, while the very pro­fes­sion­als who enter the class­rooms of schools through­out Cat­alo­nia every day are re­luc­tant to have their say. Few are will­ing to talk about it. “No thanks”, “Don’t have the en­ergy”, “They only come to us when the data are bad”, “I don’t feel like it”, “Ster­ile de­bates”, “Now they blame im­mi­gra­tion to de­flect from mis­man­age­ment and poor bud­get­ing”. These are some of the things that a large num­ber of teach­ers have said when re­ject­ing the in­vi­ta­tion to speak. “The focus is al­ways on the teacher, the last step in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, and that stings,” says Ma­rina Ruiz, a pri­mary school teacher at the Elisa Badia school in Bar­berà del Vallès. They are tired of being the ones who are poorly treated, of con­tin­u­ally adapt­ing to ed­u­ca­tion laws that change with the po­lit­i­cal colour of the gov­ern­ment, of the grow­ing ten­sion in the class­room with stu­dents, of ques­tion­ing by fam­i­lies and so­ci­ety in gen­eral, of the bu­reau­cracy that they con­sider ex­ces­sive and per­haps un­nec­es­sary and that takes away hours that could be de­voted to prepar­ing classes, of the lack of labour im­prove­ments and the need to in­crease in­vest­ment to re­verse the sit­u­a­tion. De­spite all this, how­ever, there are a few teach­ers who want to par­tic­i­pate in the de­bate to re­flect on the cur­rent state of ed­u­ca­tion, be­cause they are pas­sion­ate about their work and will­ing to con­tribute to im­prov­ing it and also de­nounce the short­com­ings of the sys­tem.

“The re­sults have not been good for a long time,” says Darío Cas­tro, di­rec­tor of the Eu­ropa In­sti­tute, a highly di­verse cen­tre in L’Hos­pi­talet de Llo­bre­gat. “If it’s not the pan­demic, it’s be­cause of changes in pro­grammes and, if not, be­cause of con­stant changes in the law... There are al­ways ex­cuses or some rea­son to jus­tify the re­sults. But I don’t think they’ve ever said, ’Let’s look at the cause, what’s re­ally going on’,” he com­plains. Pri­mary teacher Ma­rina Ruiz has sim­i­lar feel­ings: “The pres­sure falls on teach­ers who get poor re­sults with­out delv­ing into why. We feel the pres­sure from fam­i­lies and so­ci­ety, be­cause only the final re­sult is analysed, but not the process.”