Pilar Alegría (Zaragoza, 46 years old) will continue to head the Education portfolio, to which she will add the Sports responsibilities that the last legislature were assigned to the Ministry of Culture, and will also be spokesperson for the Government. Alegría was appointed Minister of Education in 2021, in the midst of educational reform. And, a year later, at the threshold of the super electoral year of 2023 – with local, regional and general elections – she also assumed the spokesperson for the PSOE. The pools of recent weeks pointed to her continuity in the Government, but with different responsibilities, which has finally been confirmed with the announcement, which rewards the work that she has carried out in the Executive and in the party.
His two predecessors in office, Isabel Celaá (of the PSOE, during the first part of his mandate) and Íñigo Méndez de Vigo (with the PP) also combined the portfolios of Education and Government spokesperson.
Before being appointed minister to replace Isabel Celaá, the main author of the new educational law, the Lomloe, Alegría, who studied teaching, had been responsible for Education in her party and a university advisor in Aragon. After a first part of the legislature during which the processing of the Lomloe generated a strong mobilization of the right and the concerted school against the Government, Alegría arrived at the ministry with the double mission of completing the educational reform and reassuring the educational world. based on dialogue. The minister approved the new curricula for all educational stages and other development standards of the Lomloe, which were also criticized by the right and by a sector of the teaching staff, but which found much less opposition than that aroused by the drafting of the law. . Alegría was successful in redirecting the Government’s relationship with the charter school, and in preventing new fronts from being opened to the Executive, for example, with the Catholic Church due to the new regulation of the subject of Religion. During her mandate, the Vocational Training Law was approved, supported, in general, by the educational community, as well as by unions and businessmen.
With Alegría, the ministry continued the educational reform, but at a pace not as accelerated as that of Celaá, partly due to the attempt to reach agreements. The call for the general elections in July stopped the approval of the new Selectivity ―after the Government’s legal services concluded that while the Executive was in office it could not approve decrees―, which in principle will now be approved so that it begins to operate in the summer 2025. The Artistic Education Law will also be taken up, which was also pending approval.
The other big change that the ministry has ahead of it is the reform of the teaching staff, from initial training – what is studied in the Education majors and in the secondary master’s degree – and the way to join teaching – competitive examinations and first steps in educational centers―, to the professional career. And it will have to do so in a different territorial context, after the last regional elections left most of the regional governments in the hands of the PP.
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