Plea for schools to be allowed to decide languages

THE Balearic Catholic School Association has asked the Balearic Government if it will drop its “radical” posture and allow each education centre to decide for itself whether to increase the number of classes taught in English in order to improve pupils' mastery of the language. The president of the School Association, Marta Monfort, was speaking yesterday at a press conference. She supports the trilingual decree announced by the Balearic Ministry of Education and Culture, but she doubts if improvement in the mastery of the English language can be achieved by decreeing a minimum number of hours for classes to be taught in the language. Monfort also said that the trilingual decree is a draft project, capable of improvement and negotiation. She added that some of the 83 centres signed up to this idea gave more than half of their classes in Catalan, which made it “difficult” to divide teaching equally between the two official languages (Spanish and Catalan) and English, as planned in the Government's decree.