About seventy families from two Opus Dei centers are asking to stop the process of making them private.

BarcelonaLess than a month ago, the La Farga schools in Sant Cugat del Vallès and La Vall de Bellaterra They informed the families that they would continue to separate the students by sex and that, to do so, they were willing to lose the concert. that they have received until now and become private schools. Now, around seventy families from these two schools in Vallès have launched a manifesto and a petition to demand that the schools stop this process and open a dialogue about the future of the schools that, until now, have been subsidized.

"The essence of school is above differentiation by sex," criticizes the group of families that have promoted this initiative. In the manifesto made public this Wednesday They argue that "undertaking structural changes in schools requires consensus, trust, and alignment with the entire educational community," and that their goal is "to ensure that the educational project remains unique, transformative, and accessible to all families who have placed their trust in it."

They also insist that they want "a non-exclusive school, one that does not become a space for educational or economic elite, and that maintains the values ​​based on Christian humanism that characterize it." Therefore, "as families of these students, concerned about the risk that the privatization of the school may pose," they say, they ask that the educational agreement in both centers be "preserved."

"These are not the conditions in which we arrived at the school."

Families who have participated in the collection of signatures They criticize the fact that, despite doing so in a "friendly manner," the Family Education Institution has made the decision without consulting the parents' opinions. They assert that the changes they want to implement mean "changing the conditions under which they arrived at school." They insist that they value the current functioning and values of the schools positively and that they do not want them to change. In this regard, the group of families from La Farga and La Vall who signed the manifesto maintain that Other schools of the same institution, such as those in Lleida, Igualada and Tarragona, have opted to maintain the agreement, "which shows that there were possible alternatives."

La Farga and La Vall have always been exclusively boys' and girls' schools, respectively, despite notifying the government in 2022 that they would stop segregating by sex in secondary school. This came after Educació announced that it would withdraw funding from schools that continued to separate boys and girls in classrooms. But a few weeks ago, the two boards met with parents to explain that, starting in the 2026-2027 academic year, they would become private, single-sex schools, continuing to separate boys and girls.