The economic crisis of 2008 and its corresponding effects in the form of cuts in public investment or job insecurity, the difficulty of young people to emancipate themselves linked to the difficulties in accessing housing and the tendency of couples to choose not to have children or, at most, having one have favored the phenomenon of inexorable drop in the birth rate in Spain.
Between the years 2008 and 2020 the drop in birth rate it has been 34.8%, a figure that places Spain as the second country in the European Union where this decline has been most pronounced. If we look at a more recent period, between 2015 and 2020, births have been reduced by 19.2% on average. This is beginning to be noticed in the number of school age population. Thus, 19.2% will also be the figure for decrease in students in primary education and this academic year 2021-22 and until the academic year 2026-27. In ESO, the decrease in students will be noticeable from 2027 to 2032.
“It is a drama and nothing indicates that this is going to change. And not only at an educational level, but also from a sociodemographic point of view. It is a bad investment for the country,” he stresses. Oriol Blancher, president of the Catalan School Association (AEC), one of the employers of the concerted school, and director of the Ipsi school in Barcelona. He regrets that here “there has been no real policy to promote the birth rate as there has been in France.”
Regardless of what the demographic decline and the aging of its population mean for a country socioeconomically, the drop in the birth rate is a positive “enormous opportunity” for improve the quality of the education system. see it like this Xavier Martinez-Celorrioprofessor of Sociology of Education at the University of Barcelona, who points out that this decline may allow lower ratios (number of students per classroom), universalize schooling for the 0-3 stage years, better serve the vulnerable student body and with special needs, facilitate work by areas and advance in the co-education (more than one teacher per classroom), these measures are contemplated in the current education law (lomloe).
“The drop in ratios cannot be to continue doing business as usual. 1×1 model (one classroom, one teacher, one hour, one subject) is old and rigid and does not facilitate collaborative teaching,” says Martínez-Celorrio, adviser to the Ministry of Education until last November and currently adviser on educational policy at the Barcelona Provincial Council. .
“Urgent” to reduce excess ratios
Martínez-Celorrio warns that “you have to be careful” in how these measures are applied to ensure that they represent a benefit for the student body. He rejects that this lowering of ratios is done in a generalized way and advocates planning the offer well, with a balance between public and concerted schools. “Lowering ratios across the board has no impact on the education system and is a very expensive measure.” He calculates that it would cost between 4,000 and 6,000 million euros.
That is why this researcher defends the need to prioritize. “It is urgent to reduce the overrates that exist in certain educational centers, located in urban and disadvantaged environments“. In this sense, this expert stresses that the regional governments “know which centers are saturated.” “You have to act on them surgically. We cannot trust everything to the natural decline in birth rates. In vulnerable environments is where the highest ratios occur, “he warns.
gives you the reason Meritxell Ruizgeneral secretary of the Christian School Foundation of Catalonia, the employers’ association that brings together the religious associations, which is more in favor of reducing the ratios more intensely in those schools where there is more need. For his part, Blancher, rather than reducing ratios, is committed to incorporating more teachers into the classrooms to better serve students.
The concerted, “terrified”
Those who also look with concern at the decline in the birth rate are the concerted schools. “The concerted school is terrified by the demographic decline and by the fact that the public school that works attracts young families who have less purchasing power than the families before the crisis,” describes Martínez-Celorrio, who predicts that there will be ” many small concerted schools that will end up closing”. In his opinion, “only the concerted one that assumes the living enrollment and the balance with the vulnerable student body will grow.” In this sense, he distinguishes between a concerted “inclusive, which is for diversity” and a concerted “pro-market”.
Oriol Blancher disagrees with this differentiation. “I take it for granted that all the concerted companies have the will to attend to diversity. I have the perception of doing a public service,” he affirms. He admits that the environment, the geographical location of the school “conditions”. And he cites the case of public schools located in high-income neighborhoods (for example in Sarrià, in Barcelona) in which the fees paid by families are very high. “Segregation is not school, it is social,” he stresses. “Most concerted are not elitist, they are social,” reiterates Ruiz.
Both Blancher and Meritxell Ruiz They warn that the concerted at risk closing will be those “more social”. “The schools on the tightrope are the ones that are attending to diversity the most,” emphasizes Blancher, who ensures that the concerted school takes on more students with needs derived from their socioeconomic environment than the public school. Ruiz warns that the closure of social concertadas will mean the “expulsion of the middle and lower classes from the concertada. That is also segregation.”
Employers take the opportunity to denounce the “underfunding” they suffer, which added to the decline in the birth rate aggravates the problem. “With the decrease in ratios, the concerted one will have to assume the underfunding with fewer students”, explains Blancher to describe that “we will die of lack of resources. We are at subsistence levels”. “The fall in births is added to the underfunding. Before, as we had full classrooms, we could sustain it. Now there are fewer children and families have less economic capacity,” Ruiz analyzes.
They admit that there is an oversupply and that action will have to be taken to regulate supply, but they claim to do so jointly and with the aim of ensuring educational quality. “There will be plenty of lines and groups. But we have to do joint programming, public and concerted, to improve the system with equality criteria,” says Ruiz, who assumes that schools that do not have students will have to close, whether they are public or concerted. And linked to vacancies and segregation, he proposes an option: there are highly segregated schools where attempts have been made to correct the situation and nothing has been achieved. Perhaps the decrease in demand could be taken advantage of, to gradually close them and redistribute the students to centers in their environment.
Related news
The fall in the birth rate is more pronounced in the communities of northern Spain. In Catalonia, the average stands at 18%, just over one point below the Spanish average. Despite this, the Government has wanted to go ahead, in addition to giving way to demands from teachers and families, and the next academic year 2022-23 begins the reduction of ratios in Infantile 3 (the old P-3), which from 25 students per classroom will have a maximum of 20 in public schools.
It also takes a first step in the universalization of the 0-3 stage starting with Infant 2 (or P-2), in which schooling will be free for families from the next academic year 22-23. Excluded from this gratuity are the dining room, reception or extracurricular services.