The Barcelona Provincial Council asks the Department of Education not to wait for the next academic year to transfer the data of students who drop out of school and to do so immediately. “If it is such a serious issue, why wait?” asked the deputy Josep Monràs yesterday, who nonetheless celebrated a long-demanded measure.
The Ministry announced on Thursday a plan to combat school dropout, a rate that in Catalonia is close to 17%. The star measure is the transfer of the data of the students who drop out to the municipalities so that they can act immediately. This procedure will be carried out with the prior consent of the parents and Education has left the request for conformity for September, together with the rest of the documents that the families sign.
Monràs considers this step unnecessary if the flow of information occurs between public administrations. He explains that municipalities already transfer data on children at risk of poverty to the Generalitat without requesting authorization. “If we wait until September, we won’t be able to start acting until June 2024,” he added.
“The lives of these young people are a problem for the country, an emergency recognized by the Government itself, so why wait?” questions the Education representative.
The deputy, who had formally requested this measure since 2021, regrets the passage of time. A year ago the council sent a collaboration agreement to work on this issue jointly between administrations and, however, has not received a response.
Likewise, Monràs considered unfortunate the belief of the department that when a young person leaves, he is no longer covered by Educació and is considered only a citizen.
The Department of Education presented on Thursday in Manresa, its crash plan against school dropout, a problem that affects 16.9% of young people. This rate, which rose 2 points in one year, is above the Spanish average (13.9%) and the EU (9.7%), and is far from the 9% target set by the European Commission, which considers that citizens cannot be left with only compulsory education and sets the minimum in high school or technical training.
The Generalitat’s plan does not have quantifiable short-term objectives or specific programs for groups with a higher risk of abandonment, but it aims to reduce the rate to 9% in 2030. How? With prevention, compensation and intervention measures and leaving the task of redirecting adolescents who drop out to some type of training (educational or work) to the municipal services. He is confident that the measures that he has already implemented will bear fruit in a few years.
Thus, among the prevention measures, we find that of sending two-year-old children to school, achieving greater motivation and involvement in learning with the reform of the curriculum and increasing professional orientation, an aspect on which it is working.
In addition, next academic year a pilot program will be activated in Barcelona, ??professional reception classrooms for immigrant students in 3rd and 4th ESO. As a novelty, students who have dropped out of 1st year of high school or who come from adult schools will have priority, like those in 4th year of ESO, in pre-registration for Vocational Training.
The star measure of this shock plan, the only really new one, is a very valuable tool for the city councils that have been demanding it for years: to immediately know the names of the boys who drop out in order to offer them outings that do not disconnect them from the education (second chance schools, short-term job training, accreditations… etc.).
But it’s a bitter candy. The measure will not be immediate, it will begin in the 2023-2024 academic year, and will require the consent of both parents and that of the student if they are already 16 years old.
The RALC is the identification number of the child as soon as it is enrolled in an educational center. This registry was established in 2015. It is like a student ID, which incorporates the educational trajectory and their condition (student with special needs due to their socioeconomic situation, origin or their physical or mental faculties) and the reasons why they disassociates from the educational center.
It is important because it alerts when a young person leaves school.
There are multiple profiles of boys who drop out of school. There is the multi-repeater who, upon turning 16, and being in the 2nd or 3rd year of ESO, withdraws from the institute himself. The one who does it in 4th. The one who finished ESO, does not enroll in anything, and stays on the sofa or works in a supermarket. The one who starts an average degree of FP and leaves it (one in four students, according to Educació). The one who starts a high school and regrets it.
Although early dropout is officially understood as young people between the ages of 18 and 24 who have not completed the second stage of secondary education (FP or baccalaureate), the dropout already begins at least two years earlier. Schooling ends at the age of 16. The EPA, in charge of giving the official data on early educational abandonment, does not count students between the ages of 16 and 18, even though they have already left the system.
For Educació, as soon as adolescents leave the educational system, it is the social services that must call and take care of them and try to reintegrate them into some type of training. “They are no longer our students and they become inhabitants of the municipality,” said Educació sources, stating that the accompaniment corresponds to the Department of Social Rights, Treball, or the municipalities. “That is why it is important to share the data,” add the same sources and “share practices of municipalities that are already doing a good job.”
City councils have developed programs for educational reconnection, concerned that the lack of training of the young population increases the risk of poverty and social exclusion, generates more consumption of social services, and can trigger conflicts.
The problem that the municipalities see, in addition to the fact that time is running out, is the difficulty for some families or the student himself (perhaps already in a vulnerable situation) to give their consent. The profiles of abandonment are very varied, but, basically, they share fragility traits due to their immigrant origin, low socioeconomic and cultural level, and mental health problems.
The Generalitat alleges a confidentiality problem. But in March 2022, the decree law on data access between local entities and Education was published. With this regulation, the municipalities provided the Government with the social data of the children, which made it possible to distribute the most vulnerable children among different schools (to avoid segregating).
Therefore, the consent of the parents was not required, which made it possible to expedite the procedures. The municipalities also set the example of health that does not require authorization to share data between a public hospital or a private one, or even in pharmacies, which receive confidential information from public services on a daily basis.
