Barcelona In 2019, Catalonia signed the first Pact against School Segregation (PSEC). Now, five years later and after a pandemic and a significant increase in vulnerability in classrooms, the Bofill Foundation has taken stock of what has been achieved since the Catalan government put in the effort to fight against school segregation. The result: a lot of progress has been made, but there are still outstanding tasks in 400 centers that make it impossible to take further steps forward to achieve the goal of having classrooms that represent the diverse society that the Catalan school has.
“The five years since the signing of the Pact against School Segregation show that it has been an essential tool to start reversing high levels of segregation and that, when a government applies measures to turn a situation around, progress is made. But also that the deployment that has been made is insufficient to deal with the situation of accumulated damage in the most segregated centres”, claims the report published this Thursday by the Bofill Foundation.
Fewer irresponsible centers, but the same segregated ones
An example of these steps forward can be found in the fact that the percentage of “balanced” schools – those that have a proportion of vulnerable students similar to that of the vulnerable population in the area where the school or institute is located – has from 51% before the signing of the PSEC to 68% last year. This positive evolution has also materialized in a decrease in the so-called “non-corresponding centers”, that is, schools and institutes that have less than half of the vulnerable students that would correspond to them based on the average number of children in this situation in your municipality. In the 2014-2015 school year, 32% of schools did not send the proportion of vulnerable students that belonged to them, but almost a decade later this percentage has fallen to 16%.
Segregated centers in Catalonia
In municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants
Despite this progress, there is a worrying reality on the other side of the coin. The percentage of segregated centers – schools and institutes that have more than 50% of vulnerable students that would ideally correspond to them to be balanced with their municipality – has not changed at all. It remains at 17%, exactly the same percentage as ten years ago. In total there are 410 educational centers. According to the Bofill Foundation’s report, this stagnation is due to the fact that measures have been taken in a specific way, but not generalized throughout the territory. In this way, actions such as the protection of live enrollment – which means that the most segregated centers do not welcome vulnerable students if they arrive with the course already started -, the closing of available vacancies or the differentiated reservation of places for students with educational needs specific for socio-economic reasons have not reached many of the segregated centres.
“Catalonia has initiated a large part of the general measures to correct the previous inaction, but it has not taken the necessary steps to reverse the structural situation of segregation in a significant part of its educational centers with a higher concentration of vulnerable students”, concludes the study
The concerted girl starts doing her homework
Since the problem of school segregation was put on the table in Catalonia, the lack of inclusion of vulnerable students by charter schools became one of the outstanding duties of the system. Although at the beginning of the implementation of the PSEC, no improvement was noticed in the work of reception by this model and almost half of the centers continued without taking responsibility for schooling the proportion of vulnerable students that belonged to them, from 2019 there is an important change in trend. The result is that last year there were “only” 29% of schools and institutes in the concerted network that did not assume this responsibility. In addition, the percentage of balanced charter schools has gone from 46% to 61% in the last four years.
Segregation in the public network
Segregation in the private network
Despite this improvement, the difference between the public and the concerted is still considerable. An example is that this last school year only one out of ten public schools had a very low concentration of vulnerable students and, on the other hand, in the concerted school this volume climbed up to 30% of schools and institutes.
Improvement in vulnerability detection
In December, the Minister of Education, Anna Simó, stepped out of the way in the face of the controversy generated by relating the poor PISA results to the proportion of vulnerable students, assuring that it was all about “child poverty and school segregation”. At that time, the ARA already explained that the percentage of vulnerable students detected between the 2018 report and the 2022 report had skyrocketed, and now the data collected in the Bofill Foundation report corroborates this. In the last four years in Catalonia, the percentage of vulnerable students detected for socio-economic or socio-cultural reasons has tripled.
Detection of vulnerable students according to educational stage
Although the report says this increase in detection “represents a key advance in the fight against school segregation”, they also warn that there remains a serious problem of underdetection. In fact, they say that there are still 40% of vulnerable students in high schools that have not been detected.
2024-02-22 09:30:01
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