The Supreme Court ruled this Monday that preventing the use of Spanish in the signage of Catalan educational centers supported by public funds, that is, in both public and subsidized schools, is not in accordance with the law. Therefore, it annuls a section of a document from the Department of Education on the organization and management of educational centers for the 2022-23 academic year.
That text established that "the signage of the center's spaces is in Catalan; in Occitan, in Aran, and in Catalan Sign Language if applicable, which are the reference languages of the educational system," as the department itself detailed in a statement.
With this decision, the high court upholds the appeal filed by the Assembly for a Bilingual School of Catalonia, which was joined by the Public Prosecutor's Office, against a previous ruling by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC).
The TSJC had already ruled in favor of the appellants on other points of that same document from the Generalitat, but considered that the prohibition of excluding Spanish as the vehicular language of teaching was not applicable to the signage of the centers' facilities, understanding that this matter was not directly part of the educational activity.
The Supreme Court, on the other hand, maintains that teaching cannot be limited to what happens inside the classroom or to textbooks and teaching materials, and that the physical environment in which educational activity takes place cannot be understood as something completely separate or alien to said activity.
Along these lines, the court describes as "very convincing" the position of the Public Prosecutor's Office when it states that the configuration of the facilities of educational centers constitutes the setting or "landscape" of educational activity and, therefore, is integrated into it.
Impact on the vehicular language and the Constitution
From this reasoning, it follows, in the opinion of the magistrates, that the exclusion of Spanish in the signage of public and subsidized educational centers "negatively affects the vehicular language of teaching or, if preferred, restricts its normal potential."
The court understands that this exclusion of the use of Spanish is not compatible with Article 3 of the Constitution and adds that "not to mention that it may introduce an unjustified difference in treatment in linguistic matters for the purposes of Article 14 of the constitutional charter itself."
The resolution recalls that the Supreme Court has already ruled on other occasions on conflicts related to the languages used in signage, but emphasizes that it is the first time it has directly addressed signage in educational centers. In this context, the court considers that Article 27 of the Constitution, which recognizes the right to education, also comes into play.