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The drop in the birth rate has already had a full impact on primary school: 147,000 fewer students in four courses

2022-07-25T10:37:36.605Z


The public school loses weight at this stage. Specialists warn of the risks of not managing the demographic curve well in education


The decrease in students due to the declining birth rate continues to advance unstoppably through the educational system.

If for years it had had a strong impact on the second cycle of Early Childhood Education (from three to six years old), now it has also become evident in the next level, primary school (from six to 12 years old): the course that has just 2,795,572 students studied this stage, 147,322 fewer than four years earlier, which represents a decrease of 5%, according to figures published by the Ministry of Education.

Numerous experts - including those who wrote a few months ago the educational chapter of the

Spain Strategy 2050

for the Government― they advocate taking advantage of the decrease in the student body —it is estimated that it will be around 800,000 until the middle of the century— to improve the quality of education, maintaining investment and thus increasing spending per student.

The problem is that this requires, in addition to significant forecasting and reorganization efforts, breaking with some administrative inertia when it comes to distributing teaching resources each year.

Álvaro Ferrer, education specialist at Save the Children, says: “It is an opportunity, but it has risks.

On the one hand, you have to decide where you keep lines [classes] and where you close them, where you keep ratios [number of students per class] and where you reduce them, and that can translate into favoring a more balanced distribution of students or more school segregation ”.

And all this, he adds, must be balanced with efficiency in spending: “You have to think about at what point you have to close a school because it is no longer efficient and perhaps it is better to redistribute those resources to provide more specialists to the system: social educators , social workers, support teachers…”.

The task is not easy, to begin with because the decreases do not occur in the same way in all the communities —in the Canary Islands, the drop in primary has been 10% and in Extremadura, 8.1%, while in Navarra it has been less than 1%—nor within the same regions.

In fact, rural areas are affected much earlier by problems of scarcity, but in these cases the efficiency criterion must be compensated with others, such as the importance of establishing population, says Ferrer.

Marc Fuster, an OECD analyst, agrees: "School closures are generally perceived as a measure of last resort, particularly in those contexts where the social and economic impact is greater, such as in small municipalities."

But beyond the geographical differences, the other great difficulty in reordering the situation lies in the fact that the two networks that must guarantee access to education, public and concerted (subsidized private), play with different rules.

The first is immediately subject to the decisions of the Administration, but acting on the second —for example, to reorganize the offer of places— is much more complicated, because during the time the concerts are valid —they are renewed every six years in elementary school—the conditions under which it was signed cannot be altered.

Thus, where the two networks compete, the public one usually has to lose when it comes to making the most immediate adjustment.

Catarroja, in Valencia, is a good example of fears.

Vicent Mañes, president of the state federation of associations of directors of public nursery and primary schools (Fedeip), works there: “It is a municipality of 28,000 inhabitants in which we live five public schools and three concerted.

This year, 150 fewer students have applied for a place in three-year-old children than the previous year.

And that is a very important differential”, he explains.

He adds: "What we defend is that the concerted network returns to what it was in the beginning: a subsidiary network of the public one."

In the infant statistics, it is clear that the public school loses students at a faster rate than the private one: 20.6% in the last decade, compared to 15.9% (the concerted one is within this last figure, since the statistic of the course 2021-2022, still provisional, does not distinguish it from the pure private).

In primary school, however, the difference is smaller at the moment: 5.2% drop compared to 4.5% in the last four years.

However, in that time the public school has already lost weight compared to the private school, going from hosting 67.8% of primary school students to 67.6%.

It is a decrease of barely two tenths, but it is striking that it occurs in years of crisis, since public education used to come out stronger from unfavorable economic contexts, since in state-owned centers free education is guaranteed,

More information

PODCAST: How does a public school close?

In this context, in addition to a plan that balances the offer between the two networks, the other great demand of the teaching staff is the reduction of the maximum ratios, a drop in the number of students per classroom that, among other things, would allow maintaining, at least in part , to the reinforcement teaching staff for the anticovid measures that have facilitated the work during the last three years.

This is claimed by both the state federation of directors chaired by Mañes and the CCOO, UGT and Ustea unions.

However, some experts warn against general and linear lowering, as it would be ineffective and very expensive.

“It is the simplest solution politically, because you avoid closing any center, with the controversy that this entails, and it is also very well received by teachers, but it is not at all effective,” insists Ferrer, who gives an example of the complexity of an issue that can have undesirable effects: “In Catalonia, the ratios have dropped only in the public one, but not in the concerted one, therefore, the flight effect of certain families can be accentuated”, since the subsidized private one will have spaces for the to keep growing.

Imaginative recipes to break inertia

Ferrer understands that it is difficult to break some inertia and raise some necessary debates ―“There is an opportunity to move towards a more demanding concerted model;

that whoever is inside truly fulfills the public service and receives sufficient funding”—, and stresses that there is a lot of room to lower ratios selectively, where necessary —for example, in centers with a large number of students with support needs—, to play with the reservation of places (those that are left for students who arrive during the course) and to rethink the way of planning the teaching staff for each center.

“We have to move towards a logic of sharing resources based on need.

Perhaps we cannot continue thinking about the [scheme of a] classroom with a teacher, in a certain figure for every so many students,

because it is much more complex when there are many centers that are advancing towards organizational modalities that break the classroom;

with heterogeneous groups, with co-teaching [two teachers who share classes]”.

Marc Fuster, an OECD analyst, reviews numerous alternatives to school closures, in light of other European experiences of accelerated student loss, especially the one that occurred in Estonia a little over a decade ago: “[You can] reconsider the way services are delivered within schools, such as where pupils of different ages are mixed in the same class, and between schools, for example, by maintaining the provision of early childhood and primary education in proximity, and consolidating the offer at higher levels for older and more independent students.

The promotion of cooperation between centers to share and optimize resources (human, material and pedagogical) can also be considered”.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-07-25

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