FEATURE ARTICLE - MAY 2012
CUTS IN SPANISH PUBLIC EDUCATION HAVE HARSH CONSEQUENCES FOR SCHOOLS
Public education in Spain is facing its biggest
challenges yet with widescale cuts being introduced by Rajoy’s Popular Party in
attempts to drastically reduce the budget deficit. Rachel Harris met a primary school headteacher in Zaragoza and asked how the cuts
will affect her inner-city school.
The primary school is surrounded by social housing, nicknamed the Bronx. Living here are gitanos (gypsies), alongside immigrants from Morocco and other African countries. Child poverty in Spain is the third highest in Europe, after Bulgaria and Rumania, it was announced this week and it’s in housing like this that these statistics are evident. Close to this social housing are private flats with mainly working-class people, increasingly affected by high unemployment levels and also often struggling to make ends meet. The school reflects its local population. Nieves Carcelon is the headteacher and as she explains: “We have a significant proportion of gypsies and ethnic minorities, higher than the proportion in most schools. It’s not the ethnic origin but the economic situation of the people that leads to problems.”
I meet Carcelon, a smart, fashionable, personable woman in her early forties, on a sunny May evening and, sitting in an outdoor café, she explains to me with a calm kind of urgency the cuts announced recently and how they will affect the students and their families from next September: “They’re talking generalities at the moment and we don’t know exactly what’ll happen in each school. In the secondary schools, teachers will teach more hours but in primary we are already working to the maximum number of hours, so that can’t increase.” In secondary schools, teacher-student ratio will increase by 20%. She explained: “There will be a reduction in the number of teachers; every year our staffing needs change and it’s these temporary staff who will go, this means that all the extra support for failing students will have to be cut.” Any teachers who are off sick for up to 15 days will not be covered by substitutes so this means that the ‘extra’ teachers will be busy covering classes. In a school such as this with high rates of absenteeism and many parents not sending children to school during the vital 3-6 year old stage, there are many students needing extra support to help them reach basic literacy and numeracy and this seems certain to suffer.
There will be no money for resources, so computers will neither be repaired nor replaced. Essential school textbooks were school property, with a system whereby students borrowed textbooks for the academic year but this will be reformed entirely from September, so that books will be the property of the students and not the school. Each child will have their own books, costing at least 200 euros per child per year. There will some grants for the most needy, but very few. In Carcelon’s opinion the new system is too sudden and badly thought out. She added: “Under the old system each book could last for four years but now every person has to buy their own books. It’s terrible for a school like ours because not every child will have books in September; it’s adding to the problems we already have.”
Many children often go hungry in this school. The regional government and the city council subsidized school meals for every child but now the regional subsidy will disappear and as a result the cost could increase from 67 euros a month per child to around 100, a prohibitive increase especially for families with three children or more. “The return to school in September will be very difficult,” Carcelon concluded.
.
The primary school is surrounded by social housing, nicknamed the Bronx. Living here are gitanos (gypsies), alongside immigrants from Morocco and other African countries. Child poverty in Spain is the third highest in Europe, after Bulgaria and Rumania, it was announced this week and it’s in housing like this that these statistics are evident. Close to this social housing are private flats with mainly working-class people, increasingly affected by high unemployment levels and also often struggling to make ends meet. The school reflects its local population. Nieves Carcelon is the headteacher and as she explains: “We have a significant proportion of gypsies and ethnic minorities, higher than the proportion in most schools. It’s not the ethnic origin but the economic situation of the people that leads to problems.”
I meet Carcelon, a smart, fashionable, personable woman in her early forties, on a sunny May evening and, sitting in an outdoor café, she explains to me with a calm kind of urgency the cuts announced recently and how they will affect the students and their families from next September: “They’re talking generalities at the moment and we don’t know exactly what’ll happen in each school. In the secondary schools, teachers will teach more hours but in primary we are already working to the maximum number of hours, so that can’t increase.” In secondary schools, teacher-student ratio will increase by 20%. She explained: “There will be a reduction in the number of teachers; every year our staffing needs change and it’s these temporary staff who will go, this means that all the extra support for failing students will have to be cut.” Any teachers who are off sick for up to 15 days will not be covered by substitutes so this means that the ‘extra’ teachers will be busy covering classes. In a school such as this with high rates of absenteeism and many parents not sending children to school during the vital 3-6 year old stage, there are many students needing extra support to help them reach basic literacy and numeracy and this seems certain to suffer.
There will be no money for resources, so computers will neither be repaired nor replaced. Essential school textbooks were school property, with a system whereby students borrowed textbooks for the academic year but this will be reformed entirely from September, so that books will be the property of the students and not the school. Each child will have their own books, costing at least 200 euros per child per year. There will some grants for the most needy, but very few. In Carcelon’s opinion the new system is too sudden and badly thought out. She added: “Under the old system each book could last for four years but now every person has to buy their own books. It’s terrible for a school like ours because not every child will have books in September; it’s adding to the problems we already have.”
Many children often go hungry in this school. The regional government and the city council subsidized school meals for every child but now the regional subsidy will disappear and as a result the cost could increase from 67 euros a month per child to around 100, a prohibitive increase especially for families with three children or more. “The return to school in September will be very difficult,” Carcelon concluded.
.