Every year around this time, many children ask about summer: "Will I be able to go to summer camp or summer camp with my friends?" Four out of 10 households, struggling to make ends meet, are told they can't. More than 300,000 Catalan children and adolescents swallow it in silence, and the summer drags on without summer camp activities, campuses, summer camps, or summer vacations, between the heat of the apartment, screens on, and many hours—too many—alone, with almost nothing to do, with sedentary leisure time.

In 2014, the Catalan Ombudsman presented a report highlighting the shortcomings Catalonia has in guaranteeing the right to educational leisure activities during school outings and camps. A decade later, a new report from the institution shows that insufficient progress has been made in addressing this challenge. "Catalonia still lacks a consistent policy to promote educational leisure activities," the Ombudsman warns in the report. The universalization of educational leisure in Catalonia, made public this Tuesday.

The fact that school cafeteria services are largely managed by companies and entities in the educational leisure sector is undoubtedly a success of the Catalan educational model. The Government's Secretary for Educational Improvement, Josefa Beltran, recently recalled, during the Acellec Economic and Social Forum, that lunchtime accounts for 30% of children's time at school. It would be unreasonable to think that the services provided during this time period were not educational in nature.

For some days now Catalonia has become the territory in the state with the most coronavirus diagnoses among young people with an accumulated incidence that exceeds a thousand infections per 100,000 inhabitants in the last 14 days in the range of 20 to 29-year-olds. In fact, the average age of the newly infected is down to 26.4 years, according to BIOCOMSC data. This boom of contagions among the young puts the educational leisure sector on alert, not only because of the positive cases -some among activity leaders and educators- but also because of the numbers forced into self-isolation: children are left without camps or camps, families have to reorganise again and companies and organisations fear for their economic sustainability. The sector, however, asks for confidence: "It has been proven that education is a safe activity. We are very eager and we feel a lot of responsibility to do well. Last summer the protocols were much stricter and we managed. Why shouldn't it be the same this summer?", says Júlia Petit, president of the Catalan Boy Scouts.