The leader of the Comuns group in the Catalan parliament, Jéssica Albiach, has warned that her party will call for the resignation of regional Education Minister Esther Niubó if the state of Catalonia’s school system has not improved by the start of the new academic year in September.
In an interview with Europa Press, Albiach said the problems at the Education Department were not new and stemmed from years of underfunding and cuts. However, she argued the current situation went beyond a lack of resources, pointing to what she described as an inability to manage conflicts and respond to an educational emergency.
Albiach said that if the situation of disaster in the Catalan education system persisted at the start of term, her group would have ample evidence that Niubó was failing to successfully resolve, manage and lead the department, and would therefore demand her resignation.
PISA test error
The Comuns leader also criticised the government’s handling of an error in the PISA examination results, saying a parliamentary committee session had left her group more outraged than when it began. She accused the government of concealing the information from parliamentary groups, noting that the error had been made public only in July despite the government having known about it for at least four months.
Albiach went further, saying the Ministry had actually flagged the issue a year ago, which she said made the matter more serious than the minister had indicated. She said it should not be difficult to establish who had been responsible for overseeing the test samples and their representativeness.
Cabinet reshuffle and budget pressure
Asked about whether regional president Salvador Illa should address a government crisis in the second half of the legislative term, Albiach declined to name names and said she preferred to focus on policy. She identified three priorities: splitting the Department of Territory, Housing and Ecological Transition; resolving the education crisis; and evaluating progress in health.
With the legislature at its midpoint, Albiach urged Illa not to repeat the first half in the second. She said her group, together with ERC, had enabled the passage of the budget, which meant the government’s excuses for inaction had run out.
She also cautioned that Comuns and ERC would not automatically support the government going forward, and accused Illa of showing a lack of humility in recent weeks. She noted that Illa governed with only 42 seats and therefore needed their support, adding that other parliamentary groups had made similar observations about his recent conduct.
