Government to spend extra €8.8 million to expand Catalan courses and places

news Cata­lan lan­guage

The gov­ern­ment has an­nounced extra spend­ing of 8.8 mil­lion euros to ex­pand the num­ber of courses and places in Cata­lan. The plan is to cre­ate 30,000 new places, which will be co­or­di­nated by the Con­sor­tium for Lan­guage Nor­mal­i­sa­tion. The Min­is­ter for Lan­guage Pol­icy, Francesc Xavier Vila, an­nounced at the end of Feb­ru­ary that the ini­tia­tive will en­tirely elim­i­nate wait­ing lists for courses.

The plan is the re­sult of an agree­ment be­tween Es­querra Re­pub­li­cana and the So­cial­ist gov­ern­ment that al­lowed Sal­vador Illa to be­come Cata­lan pres­i­dent. Vila al­ready an­nounced in De­cem­ber his in­ten­tion to “re­launch” the Con­sor­tium with an in­crease in bud­get and staff and he also high­lighted the need for more train­ing. This lat­est extra spend­ing comes after the pub­li­ca­tion of the re­cent sur­vey show­ing a fall in the use of Cata­lan.

The Con­sor­tium cur­rently has 8,000 peo­ple on the wait­ing list, in­clud­ing teach­ers and health­care pro­fes­sion­als who need of­fi­cial lan­guage cer­tifi­cates to qual­ify for em­ploy­ment. The De­part­ment of Health es­ti­mates that around 70,000 pro­fes­sion­als need train­ing in Cata­lan, while the Ustec union in­di­cates that some 4,500 teach­ers are also wait­ing.

To meet the de­mand, the plan in­cludes hir­ing more Cata­lan teach­ers and ex­tend­ing the work­ing hours of the cur­rent teach­ers. Thus, 131 teach­ers will be­come full-time, with the ca­pac­ity to teach 1,128 courses, and 50 new teach­ers will be hired to offer 500 ad­di­tional courses, with the aim of reach­ing more than 30,000 stu­dents. In ad­di­tion, a new basic level cer­tifi­cate, A1, will be in­tro­duced to cover the needs of an es­ti­mated 50,000 peo­ple who need lan­guage ac­cred­i­ta­tion.

Most of the spend­ing (6.8 mil­lion) will be al­lo­cated to the re­launch of the Con­sor­tium. A bud­get of 1.5 mil­lion will be de­voted to a line of sub­si­dies avail­able to mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties, en­ti­ties and unions to carry out courses, with an­other half a mil­lion euros going to­wards cre­at­ing a Cata­lan self-learn­ing ap­pli­ca­tion with ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence.