Due to the plague of Covid-19, the Basque exams of the Language Schools of Pamplona will not be as usual. Students may not sound this June, they probably won’t accumulate in hallways in tests of over 300 people and won’t feel like gathering and embracing colleagues they haven’t seen for a long time. The examiners and examiners of this year will continue with the desire to go to the bathroom in the written five-hour C1 test. The tranquility will be present in the tests of the Basque level that will be carried out one day yes and another also in the next. German, Italian, French and English tests will be conducted at all levels. Dystopia is over, welcome, utopia. Would the counsellor Gimeno have something similar in mind when he has stated that the tests of the School of Languages will guarantee health conditions? However, we have not been informed by the public representative of who and how he is going to guarantee them, and, furthermore, he has not made it clear to us who is going to take responsibility in the event of something going wrong. The Department of Education has decided and executed first the tests of accreditation at the linguistic level, leaving for later analysis and planning the situation. In the intention of demonstrating that it is possible to carry out mass tests in the Foral Community, the heads of the Government of Navarre have welcomed us with the students and the school workers. When we were young, we were told that we had to do experiments with soda.

The Basque professors of the School of Languages have recently known how and when this year’s accreditation tests will be. In recent months, the Department of Education has gradually sent us some information in a long process: first it determined that the written tests would have to be done by the end of May and the beginning of June, then the representatives told us that they would be in mid-June, and the last news is that they would be held in the second half of June; we know that the written tests we are going to carry out are going to be longer than ever, because we have had it.

The teachers of the School of Languages have been teaching for years, we have a direct relationship with the students and we would say that we know better than anyone the characteristics of the school, but the experts in language teaching are at the site of the Santo Domingo de Pamplona hill. In addition to the above, we have been informed that some oral tests will be telematic and that the students will be presented individually on screen. Do the Department of Education experts know that an exercise in these tests is dialogue and that talking to oneself is called a monologue? Some people know this, since someone has proposed that the student's interlocutor be the professor and the Department of Education has received and accepted the proposal. The same information informs us that, instead of two teachers, only one teacher will be able to manage the oral test. We don't know if you've noticed that we'll have two minutes to talk, take notes and evaluate them at the same time. In addition to the above, we have been told that the students of Estella will perform the tests in Estella, but we still do not know who is going to prepare the residence, who is going to perform the disinfection work and which teachers are going to work there, since being joint tests, the teachers of the School of Languages will hardly have two sites at once. The changes have been imposed on us without any certainty on what the definitive model would be, and this temporality has created discomfort both in the students and in the teaching staff, having to face again and again contradictory patterns that have linked the difficulties that the confinement has entailed for the formation of the students. The teachers are aware of our responsibility, not only do we care about our students, but we work for all the citizens of Navarra, being public employees, and that is why we only ask for the conditions to offer them the best possible service.

We teachers have collected other data, but nobody has brought it to us from the Department of Education, but our experience. It is known that some students will have a possibility to obtain the certificate less than the rest, since they are people belonging to risk groups have decided not to take the exam. We know that the quality of the tests is going to be poor and that pedagogical criteria have not been taken into account for making changes in the exercises, as the priority is that the work be developed in one way or another. We know that the Department of Education does not care about the level of Euskera that we see, as the objective is to distribute the documentation, and the consequences of that decision will last for many years. We know that counsellor Gimeno has lied or ignored us when he said that private and concerted centres are going to conduct language tests — Cambridge has postponed those in English, those in French and those in German Goethe — and told us that public education has to be private, because apparently the public cannot question what the private sector is doing and find better solutions. We know that the Government of Navarre has imposed abnormal conditions on us in order to demonstrate normality. Knowing all this, no one expects a normal result.

Wouldn't it be better, perhaps, to address that adaptive work that the counselor constantly does when she talks about the next course? Is it not more urgent, so that we do not rush again, to begin to adapt next year's programmes? Wouldn't it be more important to devote the time we have left to analyze how to help those technological gaps, or that this harsh situation has left them out of the learning process? Isn't it more reasonable for students who are now in a vulnerable state of health to also value and delay the exam to September? We are clear about what our priorities are, and it seems that they again do not coincide with those of the Department of Education. What a pity!

*Irati Badiola Artola also signs the article, along with Jaume Gelabert.

Faculty of the Department of Euskera of the Official School of Languages of Pamplona