Eduardo González
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcomed the decision of the Board of Governors of the European Schools to include Catalan as a teaching subject in the European Schools’ school system.
The agreement, adopted this Thursday by the highest governing body of the Council, will allow students who wish to do so to receive instruction in Catalan, which will enjoy the status of “Other National Language.”
“This agreement is yet another example of the results of the Spanish Government’s work to promote the use and recognition of Spanish official languages in the EU, following the signing last Monday of the administrative agreement that will allow Spanish representatives to speak in our official languages at the plenary sessions of the European Economic and Social Committee, as was already the case in the Council of the EU and the European Committee of the Regions,” the Ministry stated in a press release.
The European Schools are educational centers created jointly by the governments of the European Union member states to offer multicultural and multilingual education based on competency-based learning and with a European dimension.
These schools offer pre-school, primary, and secondary education through a specific curriculum supervised by the European Schools’ Inspectorate. Students are grouped by language section and, upon completion of secondary education, obtain the European Baccalaureate, which grants them the same rights as official national qualifications and tests from EU member states.
According to EU sources, the Board of Governors of the Board of Governors of the European Schools made this decision after the Spanish government, through the Ministry of Education, agreed to cover the costs, including teachers’ fees and any other additional costs. The same sources indicated that this decision does not set a precedent for other languages and is independent of Spain’s efforts before the EU Council to achieve the officialization of Catalan, Basque, and Galician in the European institutions.
On April 7, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs signed the renewed agreement with the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), which will extend the use of Spanish co-official languages to its members’ interventions in plenary sessions. The agreement was signed by the Secretary of State for the European Union, Fernando Sampedro, and the Secretary-General of the EESC, Isabelle Le Galo, at the Committee’s headquarters in Brussels.
“The recognition of these languages as official languages of the EU and the promotion of their use in the institutions of the European Union are a priority for the Government of Spain, in order to achieve the goal of bringing our multilingual national identity to Europe and bringing the institutions closer to citizens,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated after the signing of the agreement.
