“The first step to improve the Economic and Fiscal Regime (REF) of the Canary Islands is to bring it to schools”. With this objective, the commissioner of the REF, José Ramón Barrera, and the Ministry of Education, directed by Poli Suárez, have announced the creation of a technical team that will promote the learning of the historical heritage of the REF for the 98,000 students of Compulsory Secondary Education and Baccalaureate.
According to the Director General of Planning of Education, Inclusion and Innovation, David Pablos González, the Center for Curriculum Development has guaranteed the presence of learning related to the REF in the curricula of several subjects.
In ESO it will be History and Geography of the Canary Islands and Personal and Social Economy, while in high school it will be included in the subject of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Business Activity; Business and Business Model Design; and Fundamentals of Administration and Management.
Thanks to the inclusion of these learnings in the LOMLOE Canary Islands curricula, students will have the opportunity to delve into learnings related to the differentiated regime that the Archipelago has to counteract the extra costs of its remoteness and insularity.
The students of these stages will learn the main milestones from their origin, when in 1507 the Crown of Castile granted the Canary Islands tax exemptions in perpetuity. After five centuries, in 1972, these singularities were reflected in the first law of economic compensations and tax incentives, which is still in force today with various partial reforms.
Once included in the curricula of the aforementioned stages, the General Directorate of Planning of Education, Inclusion and Innovation is working on this project whose objective will be the design of educational resources and learning situations focused on the acquisition of these specific contents. The project will benefit 62,500 ESO students and 25,944 Baccalaureate students.
The REF will also have more prominence in the University Access Test (PAU), in which more than 11,000 students enrolled this year.
For José Ramón Barrera this agreement represents the beginning of a new stage, in which he hopes to ensure that “the new generations know the history of the charter, value its current importance and defend it, knowing that it is the essential tool that recognizes our uniqueness to equalize us with the rest of the country and the European continent”.
These actions are part of the Brújula 20 project of the Ministry of Education, which consists of developing digital content (didactic programs, learning situations and digital educational resources) that are innovative and allow complementing traditional paper textbooks. The initiative provides pedagogical and methodological support to teachers while seeking to stimulate learning with more creative tools.