Response to Covid-19 during the school year 2020-2021
In Spain, some schools opened on 7 September 2020 while in regions where Covid-19 cases are high, schools will remain closed for a couple more weeks.
The Government has signed, with the autonomous communities, a Declaration of coordinated actions in Public Health against COVID-19 for schools during the 2020-2021 academic year.
In the first place, the Government and the autonomous communities have agreed that, in general, the teaching will be face-to-face for all levels and stages of the education system, with priority given to younger students.
The document reiterates the need to resume face-to-face educational activity "as a priority" by adopting a series of preventive, hygiene and health promotion measures that guarantee the safe return to the classroom.
The educational centres will remain open throughout the school year ensuring dining services, as well as educational support for minors with special needs or socially vulnerable families, as long as the epidemiological situation allows it.
In general, an interpersonal distance of at least 1.5 meters will be maintained. In early childhood education and in the first cycle of primary education, students will organize themselves into stable bubbles so that boys and girls can socialize and play with each other. In these cases, the distance limitation criteria will not apply.
On the other hand, the Declaration of coordinated actions establishes the mandatory use of the mask from 6 years of age regardless of the maintenance of interpersonal distance.
Hand hygiene will be performed frequently and meticulously, at least five times a day. In addition, the student body will receive health education. The cleaning of schools will be intensified, especially in the bathrooms and places of greater use. Likewise, the facilities will be ventilated frequently, at least for 10-15 minutes.
In addition, the body temperature of all students and staff will be taken prior to the start of the day.
People who have Covid-19 symptoms will not be allowed in the school, whether they students, teachers or other school personnel.
The Catalan regional government is hiring 5,000 extra teachers to limit the overall contacts within schools and allow children to avoid wearing face masks and social distancing. The region of Madrid intends to hire 600 teaching staff and has proposed four different action plans depending on the severity of the pandemic.
Response to Covid-19 during the school year 2019-2020
The majority of Spanish schools have online platforms. All regional Departments of Education have their own web sites with educational resources.
The Ministry of Education and Vocational Training created a webpage to channel quality educational resources, tools and applications available to teachers, families and the students. The page is also linked to materials prepared and launched by the regional governments, private entities and other stakeholders.
Online resources are displayed by educational level (primary, secondary, VET). Resources on the webpage include Procomún (Open Educational Resources Network with more than 94,000 resources), EDIA Project (organized by curricular topics), rubrics database to help evaluation process, History resources database, EDAD Project resources (aimed at distance learning in Secondary education) and VET Simulators.
Moreover, the web page of the Centro para la Innovación y Desarrollo de la Educación a Distancia, the unit in charge of distance education at the Ministry, offered educational contents and materials for autonomous learning aimed at secondary students, language learners, and open training.
As for Vocational Education and Training, digital resources available include 104 qualifications.
Besides, the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training and the Spanish public television (TVE) have reached an agreement to offer audiovisual learning materials through La2 and channel Clan TV, from Monday to Friday for students aged 6 to 16. Apart from curricular contents, the programming will also include emotional competences.
And, as mentioned before, educational authorities have implemented systems to provide students with fewer resources with meals.
With regards to universities, all of them have a virtual campus - for all the subjects of all their degrees - where part of the academic activity is carried out (didactic material, videos,...) but, until now, we hadn’t still essayed the possibility that all the Face-to-face teaching becomes virtual and if the information technology available in each institution could support demand. In any case, all the universities are working to meet this new and great challenge. On the other hand, online universities carry out their activity but with some changes due to the mobility restrictions.
Regarding the e-tools used by the different universities, most of them have virtual campuses created by and for them. However, they also use other e-tools such as mainly, Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai or Google classroom.
Besides the latter, the Ministry of Universities and CRUE Spanish Universities (the Conference of Spanish University Rectors) have launched the portal “Conectad@s: la universidad en casa” (‘Connected, the university at home’). This portal has been created with the main aim of supporting teachers, students, and society in general in terms of online education. It is an initiative aimed at providing advice and making available resources for all the universities in Spain in order to face, in the most effective way, the current closure of universities due to the coronavirus outbreak.
All the resources within this platform are free of use and are focused both on the Spanish university community and on educational institutions.
The objectives of this portal are:
1. To offer a wide range of guidance and training resources for teachers on online training methodology, which could be useful for the design and development of online classes.
2. To facilitate researchers, teachers, and students a complete repertoire of digital materials and open content from different areas of knowledge.
3. To collect a series of conferences, tips, outreach materials and personalised attention for the psychological care of those who require it.
Open online training on “resources for online learning” is offered for teachers to learn about the use of the virtual classroom, communication instruments, content publications and evaluation process.
The majority of teachers are using their own Internet facilities. Besides, to facilitate continuity for those with difficulties to continue their training online, the Ministry has signed an agreement with three companies to provide students with 20,000 cards to access the Internet, as well as Webex licenses for videoconferences and support for teachers. Each card has 40 Gbs of monthly data to allow the connection of students and teachers through mobile devices. Other companies have donated 10,000 cards more through Red Cross, and non-profit organizations and businesses are cooperating to provide equipment to those students with less access to computers.
As regards universities, to solve possible problems or doubts both for students and professors and administrative staff, they have tutorials or, in some cases, web pages created ad-hoc for this occasion as support for remote work and teaching. In addition, universities have reinforced their ‘user service centers’ to solve all the possible doubts.