Catalan families are the ones who pay the most in terms of fees for the concerted. This is mainly because they do not receive enough public funding to sustain themselves, but there is also a minority group of centers that want to differentiate themselves and improve their offer. Either way, quotas are a barrier to access that generates inequality. This is what the EsadeEcPol study The cost of access to charter school in Spain, led by Lucas Gortazar, Ángel Martínez and Xavier Bonal, underlines. To draw it up, they compared data from the household expenditure survey on education (2019-2020) and the private education funding and expenditure survey.
Catalan families pay an average of 1,696 euros per year (188 euros per school month), while in Madrid they contribute 1,156 euros; in the Basque Country, 959 euros; those of Valencia, 597, and those of Andalusia, 453. The Spanish average is between 680 and 860 euros.
“Catalonia has not surprised us, because the percentage of public expenditure on education is one of the lowest in Spain”, sociologist Xavier Bonal explained yesterday to indicate that families compensate with their contribution the funding that the centers do not receive from the administration, which does not happen in other communities. At least half of the centers would be at this extreme, and even two-thirds (with modest average quotas). “But there is also a sufficiently significant proportion of centers in over-financing and economic profit (25%), which they do not justify their high fees”, he continued.
Average non-agreed expenses are basically allocated to salary expenses for management, psychologists, service staff or teachers. The effort of the families is great as chartered schools represent 30% of the Catalan system.
In Madrid, with a larger public sector, the situation is different. Better funded charter centers charge higher fees. And the bigger they are, the higher they are. In the Basque education system, the concertada enjoys sufficient funding, but some centers charge fees for extraordinary expenses. In Andalusia, only four out of ten students pay.
In Spain, in general, 30% hardly pay and 10% assume 45% of the total expenditure. This is 310 euros per 1,000 annual fee. In total it is 947 and 1,186 million euros for the stages ranging from 3 to 16 years.
The authors propose to know the cost of a school place (as in Catalonia), audit non-agreed expenses, supervise the cost of canteens and develop mechanisms for the concert system of over-financed centers with high quotas.
