Not always when you want you can: El Raval premieres a tool against school dropout
The Tot Raval Foundation creates a community program to prevent and reduce young people from the neighborhood from dropping out of studies prematurely
Barcelona"Do you want to succeed? All you need is attitude, effort, and discipline," says a young man enthusiastically. "I had to stop studying to work," replies a companion. "I have to take care of my five siblings," responds another young woman. "I don't have papers and, therefore, I can't do internships," comments another. The scene is a sketch performed by the theater group of the Xamfrà entity, but it highlights a constant reality among the students in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona: You can't always do what you want.
The data confirm this. In Ciutat Vella, 20.5% of students do not achieve basic competencies in 6th grade of primary school, and one in four students finishes compulsory secondary education without obtaining a diploma. In contrast, in Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, only 4.4% do not pass basic competencies, and only one in 25 does not obtain a diploma in compulsory secondary education. The Tot Raval Foundation has been working for years with a community network in the neighborhood to try to reduce these inequalities and is now aiming to take a leap forward with a new tool: the Community Program for the Prevention and Reduction of Early School Leaving in El Raval.
Created through an alliance between Tot Raval, the University of Barcelona (UB), and a hundred organizations in the neighborhood, the program is born with the objective of reducing the school dropout rate in the neighborhood by 25% in five years. The idea is to generate a shared territorial strategy that allows identifying how educational inequalities are created and accumulated, and from there, generate a plan of action agreed upon with the educational community. To do this, they will have the funding from the SEAT CUPRA Foundation, which will provide a stable economic injection until 2030.
"It is a privilege to think that we have time to undertake a medium-term project," celebrated the program coordinator Anna Lite, at the presentation of the plan this Monday at the CCCB auditorium. For now, the program has begun with a diagnosis of educational inequalities in El Raval that will serve to agree on a shared action plan with the different stakeholders in the educational community and to begin the first interventions.
UB Chair
All this analysis and the application of potential measures will be accompanied by a new chair: the UB-Fundació Tot Raval Chair of Community Action for Educational Equity, which will have to offer methodological, strategic, and scientific support to the process. The chair will be responsible for research, knowledge transfer, advice, and program evaluation, helping to assess interventions, methodology, and the impact of actions taken.
"Premature school leaving is the latest symptom of a trajectory of accumulated inequality that begins with unequal preschool education and is accentuated by the unequal conditions in which children and young people face learning processes," warned the co-director of this new chair, Sheila González.
The presentation of the new program against school dropout was attended by the rector of the UB, Joan Guàrdia; the director of the SEAT CUPRA Foundation, Patricia Such; the manager of the Barcelona Education Consortium, Anna Terra, and the commissioner for the Ciutat Vella Pact, Ivan Pera.
