Catalan schools must manage 9,000 new students each month.

BarcelonaStarting next year, the Department of Education plans to incorporate historical enrollment figures—students who enter a school or secondary school after the school year has already begun and registration has closed—into the school place planning process for each region. The development was announced this Monday by the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, in a parliamentary committee after making public a key fact: since the start of the 2024-2025 school year, up to 74,328 new students have entered the Catalan education system outside of the regular enrollment period. This is 11,000 more children and adolescents than those who arrived last year.

This figure means that, considering we are eight months into the school year, on average Catalan schools and secondary schools must manage more than 9,000 new students each month. "It is a reality that we can no longer consider exceptional and that we must take into account," said Niubó. However, for the moment, the Education Ministry has not specified which schools are receiving these thousands of students, nor where they are from. That is, it has not been made public whether they are students who have changed schools or municipalities, or if they are newly arrived students.

Niubó only gave an approximate example of the students enrolling in an intermediate year (which is neither I3 nor 1st year of ESO, the courses in which families usually register) in Barcelona: "More than a quarter of the applications submitted for pre-registration for the next year have been for intermediate years." She added that the majority are cases of changing schools within the same municipality and that 25 percent "are due to changes of students coming from other parts of the country or from outside."

The figure given by the minister this Monday is much higher than the estimate that the Department of Education itself had made mid-year, to which ARA has had access. As of February, the Ministry of Education estimated that approximately 12,160 students had enrolled in Catalan schools and secondary schools, placing the monthly average at approximately 2,000 new students per month.

According to this initial calculation made by the Government mid-year, the year with the highest number of enrolled students was the first year of compulsory secondary education (ESO), with 1,553 more students than at the beginning of the year. This was followed by the first year of compulsory education (I3), with 1,424, and the fourth and fifth years of primary school, both with more than a thousand new students compared to the number enrolled at the beginning of the year. In any case, by February, all school years in Catalonia (pre-school, primary, and secondary) had received more than 700 enrolled students. The only exception is the 4th year of compulsory secondary education, but in this case it should be taken into account that, as this is the last year of secondary school, many newly arrived students are advised to opt for other options, as they will have very little time to graduate.

For all these reasons, Niubó has warned that if these almost 75,000 students who have arrived in the classrooms with the school year already started are not taken into account, there could be negative consequences in terms of school segregation: "If we did not take this new reality into account when designing the initial offer of the ordinary registration period, we would find ourselves with a poorly distributed offer, which ends up favoring the concentration of vulnerable students in certain centers and perpetuating imbalances that as a system we cannot allow."

Closure of lines in the concerted

Beyond the current enrollment figures, in his appearance before Parliament, Niubó also spoke about the closure of subsidized school systems. After having withdrawn the subsidy from an average of one hundred groups per year in subsidized schools and institutes over the last four academic years, this Monday, Niubó announced that, in the latest review conducted this year, the Department of Education has proposed withdrawing the subsidy from 155 groups for the next academic year before the enrollment period opens. Specifically, it proposes closing 101 preschool units, 44 primary units, and 10 secondary units.