Students at Nursery, Primary and Secondary School will learn about IT programming starting next 2022-2023 school year

The Minister of Education and Professional Training has taken part today in the international seminar ‘Education for the 21st Century in Latin America and the Caribbean: to flourish, race and innovate in the digital era’, organized by the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB).

During her statement, the Minister has upheld the need to learn from the pandemic to take advantage from the digitalization of the educational system the best we can.

“Because of the pandemic, we’ve had to accelerate the digital transformation in the field of education. That abrupt immersion has revealed significant gaps that need to be filled in a calm, peaceful manner. Among other issues, we’ve found great [socioeconomic] breaches”, has claimed the Minister in her speech. “We’ve learnt that digital transformation demands the best training”, she added.

“This new technological paradigm is not a purpose on its own, but we need to use it as an extraordinary tool to reach priorities that we already meant for our educational system, such as achieving schooling for the entire population during the mandatory stages, reducing early school dropout, increasing the quality and the depth of the knowledge that the young boys and girls are acquiring through motivation and the digital competencies of our teachers”, she concluded.

In this matter, the Ministry of Education and Professional Training has released an educational reform that includes the digital competency among the 8 key competencies that students must acquire. Moreover, starting next 2022-2023 school year, the new Code School 4.0 Plan will make sure that students at Nursery, Primary and Secondary school learn IT programming. The digitalization is also core to the new Professional Training fostered by the Ministry—not only in methodology, but also through the teaching resources and the crafting of new studying plans. They are also working on the improvement of the lecturers’ digital competencies and promoting changes in the pedagogical methodologies.

 Translated by Andrea Expósito Santana