The charter school welcomes three times as many immigrant students as it turns 10.

Barcelona"Today, more female students can share a classroom with classmates from their neighborhood than in the past." This was one of the conclusions presented this Thursday by the director of the Bofill Foundation, Ismael Palacín, at the presentation of the study. The charter school today. Unlike what the data showed just a decade ago, today, six years after the National Pact against Segregation, the system is beginning to see a significant improvement, especially with the change in the role of a large part of the subsidized schools.

According to the study led by the expert in school segregation and analysis of public policy data from Bofill, Maria Segurola, seven out of ten (69%) subsidized schools in Catalonia are jointly responsible. when educating foreign students. That is to say, the social composition of their classrooms is the same as that of the school's neighborhood or municipality. The situation is new, since, according to the report, currently state-funded schools and institutes enroll three times as many foreign students as those who turn ten.

Despite celebrating the progress, Segurola warns that there is still much to be done to achieve a balance between schools and eradicate school segregation. One of these is deciding how to manage the fact that there are still 154 schools that are not jointly responsible for accommodating vulnerable students. Of these, the most worrying are the 21% of state-funded schools considered by the report to be elitist: those that have only one vulnerable student or none in each classroom (regulations state they must have two, and on average schools have four per classroom); They offer more places than their designated school roll to attract well-off students from other areas, and they end up condemning nearby schools to a higher vulnerability rate than they should.

Furthermore, there are also 10% of charter schools that, despite having improved, still do not manage to ensure that their classrooms meet the level of diversity of the neighborhood or municipality in which they are located.

Take advantage of the new concert agreement

Bofill's study estimates that state-funded schools that do not comply with the provisions of the anti-segregation pact receive 34% of the state-funded budget paid by the Generalitat (Catalan government). This proportion means that the Catalan education system "allocates 402 million euros of public funds to schools that segregate," she warns. Thus, Segurola insists that the Catalan government should take advantage of the fact that state-funded schools must be renewed for the 2026-2027 academic year to introduce a rule that makes the renewal of state-funded schools conditional on their enrollment of the corresponding number of vulnerable students according to their area. "Just as state-funded schools that segregate by sex are withdrawn, aid should be withdrawn from those that segregate socially," the expert insists.

The Federation of Christian Schools of Catalonia (FECC), which represents a large proportion of the country's private schools and many of the schools serving the most vulnerable students, advocates that all schools reserve at least 2% of places, as required by law. "Vulnerable families are the ones who choose where to enroll. They cannot be forced to enroll in a school; they should also be able to choose their school," they insist in a statement, denouncing that "schools cannot resolve residential segregation."

In this regard, they point out that "what truly segregates is that education is not free and that families have to pay to attend private schools due to a lack of funding." This underfunding, according to FECC estimates, led to private schools having a deficit of 65 million euros last year.