The Diplomat
Last Tuesday, the Council of Ministers approved the referral to Parliament of the treaty between Spain and the Czech Republic on the operation and activity of the Czech-Spanish bilingual sections in Czech high schools.
The Government requests the urgent processing of the agreement, which was signed in Prague in November 2021, and authorises the expression of Spain’s consent to be bound by this Treaty.
With the signing of this Treaty, Moncloa explained, the programme of bilingual sections in the Czech Republic, which began in 1990 under the Treaty of Cultural Cooperation between Spain and the then Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia, will be fully covered.
Since then, the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Vocational Training have worked together to promote and disseminate Spanish language and culture in public secondary schools by training bilingual pupils or pupils with a high level of knowledge of Spanish language and culture through the programme, creating a network of academic excellence of which six schools are currently members.
According to the Government, the Czech education authorities have recently expressed to the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training their intention to implement an improvement in the conditions of teachers belonging to this programme of bilingual sections in the next school year.
However, the Czech authorities make such improvements conditional on the entry into force of the treaty, which aims to strengthen the teaching of Spanish and subjects taught in Spanish, as soon as possible.
