The president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has committed this Wednesday to establishing a common Ebau in the eleven Autonomous Communities in which the party currently governs. This was announced at a colloquium on education held in León in which the PP leader also called on the Government to apply this proposal in the rest of Spain. This is a common demand in the party when it is in opposition. In all the years that he has governed, either with José María Aznar or with Mariano Rajoy, it never occurred to him to implement it.
“This system will mark a before and after in the decentralized educational policy in the Autonomous Communities, with links of union in equal access to the university throughout the Spanish territory,” defended Feijóo, who explained that from his party They are working on a proposal with all their Education Ministers to present an equivalent university entrance test throughout Spain, with the intention of making it available to the Ministry of Education and all the autonomous communities.
The PP’s argument is that the current admission system at the University is unfair because all students in Spain compete to go to the same centers, but they do so from different Ebau, each one from their own autonomous community. Feijóo has defended continuing to move towards “a system of equal opportunities” at Ebau and for university entrance tests to be common. “Our commitment is that the EBAU is a common system in all the autonomous communities of the PP in the 2025 academic year,” he added. Regarding the fact that 60% of the final grade for admission to the University depends on performance in the Baccalaureate (which is also evaluated differently between regions or depending on whether one studies in the public or private school) there has been no the popular commented nothing.
Sources from the PP have explained that their objective is for the eleven regions in which they govern to promote an Ebau that is the same “in content, correction criteria and date of celebration”, which will be applied to 70% of the students, who reside in autonomies. where the Popular Party governs.
An almost unviable proposal
Numerous educational experts have repeatedly explained the technical difficulty – not to say impossibility – of implementing a common Ebau for the entire territory in a decentralized system. The problems raised by the PP proposal are several.
The most obvious is that the contents of the Baccalaureate curriculum are not common to all of Spain. With the educational competencies transferred, the autonomous communities are responsible for half (it varies a little if they have an official language or not) of the contents, which makes it impossible to give an equal test to all students that includes everything that is studied. In order to do so, all the contents would have to be common throughout Spain – which goes against the distribution of powers, as the Constitutional Court recalled a few years ago in response to a complaint about a similar problem in Catalonia – or leave out part of them, which would have a direct effect on what is taught in the Baccalaureate, a stage highly marked by the Selectivity and which focuses on the contents that enter the test. If a part of them is left out, they will stop paying attention in class, which does not seem to be in line with the “level rise” that the PP demands.
The single Ebau would not solve another inequality between communities either: the different study conditions that each community offers its students, from the ratios of students per class to the resources of the centers, etc. Furthermore, it is logistically complicated, although feasible, to coordinate a test that is held on the same day and time in several autonomous communities, the only feasible way to do a common exam.
One formula in which progress is being made is to homogenize the correction criteria, a possible source of inequalities (also difficult to address, because even each court is different), but based on different tests.
Feijóo has also indicated his intention to extrapolate the educational system of Castilla y León to the rest of Spain, considering that “the appropriate thing” is to equalize upwards and not lower the level, and has taken advantage of his intervention to boast of the good results obtained by the region in the PISA report, after having considered that Spain has obtained “terrible results” in this evaluation. Feijóo is obvious that the students who have taken the exam in this edition of PISA have done so after having studied all of Secondary School with Lomce, the educational law that his party approved.
Furthermore, the leader of the PP has demanded that the PSOE “not try to carry out in the classrooms the politics that it has renounced to carry out in the institutions” and has insisted that education should not be “a thrown weapon.” On the other hand, he has demanded that the ordinary education modality be made compatible with the special one “without criminalizing any option and guaranteeing the freedom of families.”
In this sense, the party had already requested from the Government this Tuesday a “comprehensive reform of the Educational System with the Autonomous Communities” after holding a meeting between Feijóo and its various Education Ministers. After the meeting, the PP considers that it is necessary to hold a Sectoral Conference to comprehensively address all problems in Education and consider that the results of the PISA report “reflect the failure of the educational policy of the Government of Pedro Sánchez.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
