THE ROLE OF DIGITAL TOOLS IN BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN COMPETENCY-BASED EDUCATIONAL POLICY AND PRACTICE IN SPAIN

Following European policy, Spanish current legislation on education promotes Competency-Based Learning (CBL). The present paper describes the role of student competencies in primary and secondary education as stated in National curriculum and selected Regional regulation. However, it has been argued that the difficulty of educational change lays in putting policies into practice. For this reason, the paper reviews initiatives led by public institutions aimed to bridging the gap between policy and practice, which mainly include teacher training programmes and digital repositories. Building on experience from previous National and European projects, we suggest digital tools that could facilitate teachers' task of fostering student competencies. Another challenge to a massive implementation of competence-based learning has been that teachers must get used to understanding their own learning in terms of competencies. The article summarises the planned structural reform of teachers' professional development and we identify enablers to its implementation, with an emphasis on digital tools.