Two schools in Vallès have withdrawn from the agreement to continue separating boys and girls.

BarcelonaA step backward in the fight to eliminate schools that segregate by sex. As has been the case All of Sant Cugat As confirmed by ARA, the La Farga schools in Sant Cugat del Vallés and Valle de Bellaterra have informed families that they will continue to segregate students by gender. To do so, they are willing to lose the funding they have received until now and become private schools. Although both schools have communicated this intention to families for the next academic year, sources from the Education Department assure this newspaper that, for the moment, "officially as of today" they have not received any "communication or request."

La Farga and La Vall are part of the Family Education Institution and have always been exclusively boys' and girls' schools, respectively, despite notifying the government in 2022 that they would stop segregating by gender in secondary school. They said this after the Education Department announced that it would withdraw the funding from those schools that continued to separate boys and girls in classrooms. However, this Monday night, the two boards met with parents to explain that, starting in the 2026-2027 school year, they will become private, single-sex schools.

The Family Education Institution explains that the decision was made to "guarantee the educational project and remain faithful to the schools' identity." They also claim that "gender-gender differentiation is another element of the personalized education" they advocate for.

Fee Increase

According to ARA, the institution, which encompasses eight different schools in Catalonia and the Valencian Community, had already proposed a strategic plan to self-finance schools that lost the Generalitat's financial support in order to "differentiate" their students. According to calculations by La Farga and La Vall, to cover the loss of the support, which represented an income of more than 3 million euros, fees would have to increase by more than 300 euros. Finally, sources from the institution assure that, on average, families will not have to pay more than 60 euros more with the change.

A priori, the fact that they do not have to increase fees for families so much is also due to the fact that more than 300 new students have arrived at these schools in the last two years.