The public services bottleneck: solutions?

The public systems we have in operation were designed for reasonably predictable societies. Schools, healthcare, employment services, social policies: all of it was built on the premise that there was a majority who had stable links in the family, neighborhood, and workplace, and who followed more or less standard itineraries. And that, on the other hand, there was also a minority who deviated and needed exceptional attention. This premise blew up a long time ago. What was once episodic, such as precariousness, diversity of origins, non-linear life paths, young people's disengagement from institutions, has become increasingly structural. And public systems, designed to manage homogeneity, are increasingly overwhelmed by a reality that does not fit into the expected boxes.

This is not happening only here. Across Europe, educational and labor systems are facing the same reality: people's educational and professional lives no longer follow the script that institutions had written for them. There are young people who drop out of studies and return years later, people who arrive from other countries with real skills but no recognized qualifications, workers who have to reinvent themselves professionally several times throughout their lives. The linearity with which one used to think about studying, graduating, or working is today a fiction for many, and the tools designed to support it are becoming increasingly insufficient.

affects 13.5% of young people, above the European average and far from the 9% target set for 2030. They are some In Catalonia, early school leaving affects 13.5% of young people, above the European average and far from the 9% target set for 2030. This amounts to around 70,000 boys and girls who leave the system without any post-compulsory qualification. Behind the figure are specific lives, and behind these lives have been, for years, third-sector organizations that have done what the system has not: going to find these young people, listening to them, proposing an itinerary that made sense for them, and accompanying them with teams that combine teachers, educators, psychologists, professional trainers, experts in each trade, and labor prospectors. Organizations like those that make up the Catalan Association of Schools and Centers for New Opportunities have shown that personalized attention, flexibility, and the ability to adapt to each person are not abstract pedagogical ideals: they are the condition for things to work for those who the standard system has left behind.

Now the Generalitat has the will to find a way to incorporate these centers into the Vocational Training System, giving them recognition and establishing financing mechanisms. It is good news that what has been built from the bottom up receives institutional validation. But here, as in increasingly frequent cases, we must go beyond the logic of "one problem-one department". Education and Business and Labor will have to be involved, building the necessary response framework with the entities that have long been striving to help these young men and women.

It is not about replacing the public system, but about recognizing that it alone cannot reach everything and that it needs to ally itself with those who are already on the ground. But the risk of the administration taking over issues that had been working outside of institutional structures is well known: that regulation imposes instruments designed for ordinary schooling – rigid educational contracts, standard ratios, closed professional profiles – on a reality that works precisely because it escapes this logic and adapts to what it faces. Regulating is necessary; standardizing can be lethal.

The underlying lesson goes beyond the case of the new opportunities schools. I am referring to the administration's tendency to confuse equality with homogeneity. Treating everyone the same can be, paradoxically, the most effective way to perpetuate inequality. 21st-century public systems must learn to coexist with diversity without trying to reduce it. This means accepting that equality is not guaranteed by treating everyone in the same way, but by giving each person what they need. And that often, those who best know what people need are those who have been working alongside them for years.