For two years, in his first and second years of ESO, Juan attended afternoon revision classes at his public high school, Ramón y Cajal in Albacete. “He helped me in all areas, but especially in mathematics, with equations, and in language, with syntax, which was very difficult for me,” he comments. This has helped him avoid problems in the slippery transition between primary and secondary education, says his father, Juan González, a public school teacher, who only regrets that the program is only for the first two grades, and this year, in third grade, his son can no longer go. “Now he attends the academy, Tuesday and Thursday, at the same time. It’s the same, but before it was free and now we pay. And not only is it worse financially, but before he was more motivated. Since the lessons were in his education center, he was with his classmates, and they went over exactly what the teachers had told him in the morning,” he says.
Spain is one of the developed countries where fewer secondary schools offer refresher courses to their secondary school students. 40% do so, 25 points lower than the OECD average, and very far from Korea or the United Kingdom – two of the countries that achieve the best results in the PISA Report, the largest international assessment -, whose percentages exceed 90%.
According to experts, the absence of this type of program slows down the improvement in academic performance, especially among children who do not live in wealthy families, while the private extracurricular educational sector, the so-called shadow education, to which families allocated 1.7 billion euros in 2021 increases. The delay that Spain shows in this field is linked, according to Lucas Gortazar, director of Education at EsadeEcPol, to the country’s poor tradition of personalizing teaching. “The vast majority of spending expansions have been aimed at expanding the number of teachers and reducing the number of students per class. This has meant less ability to provide an individualized response to students, in exchange for a slightly better, generalized response to all students.”
Gortazar believes the underlying cause is pure political economy. “The beneficiaries of these programs tend to be students with a curricular gap or more socioeconomically disadvantaged. We know that these types of families vote less than average. And in front of them, however, they have a large group: teachers and many middle-class families, who vote more and have always wanted general reductions in the number of students per class.”
Juan González, the father of the Albacete high school student, now pays 60 euros a month for private lessons. A figure that would be very difficult for Sonia, 35 years old, mother of a student from the Virgen del Remedio public institute in Alicante who attended the first two years of the free ESO reinforcement lessons in her centre. “Both my husband and I are unemployed and we have three children, so for financial reasons I couldn’t have taken him to private lessons. Thanks to this he has kept going,” she says.
The hole in the Spanish education system in this sector is becoming increasingly serious, adds the Director of Education of EsadeEcPol, in a context in which foreign students are growing, some of whom need support to catch up in their studies, and whose early school dropout rate is triple that of natives.
From not understanding the lessons to a scientific high school diploma
The case of Fátima, 15, a fourth-year ESO student at the public Guadarrama school in Madrid, is an example of the usefulness of these programs. The teenager arrived in Spain in her first year at ESO and shortly after enrolling in classes she was convinced she would repeat the year because she didn’t speak Spanish. His center offered refresher classes, two hours two days a week, in small groups. He signed up and managed to save the year. “They helped me a lot, especially in Language, History and Biology. In Mathematics I didn’t need it so much because I understood numbers,” he says. Fátima’s mother is a housewife, her father works in a restaurant, she studies in the fourth year of the ESO, gets good grades, intends to do the scientific baccalaureate and then, perhaps, study Medicine.
In a context like the Spanish one, where almost all secondary (and increasingly primary) public schools concentrate the school day in the morning, public revision classes have, in addition to their academic utility, also a social utility, says Rosa Rocha, director of the institute where Fátima studies. “Not only do they help them improve academically, but otherwise many of the children who come would spend their afternoons alone.”
The directors of the institutes consulted to draw up this report agree that, while positive, the additional courses offered do not cover real needs. Rocha, for example, regrets that the program funded by the Community of Madrid begins in January, when many students “have already failed the first assessment”. Jesús Medrano, principal of the public school Cinco Villas, in Ejea de los Caballeros, Zaragoza, adds: “The program is important, but also insufficient. With the staff we have we can serve around 30 students two afternoons a week, when we would need to give them more hours and serve more students.” Those 30 kids are equivalent to approximately 5% of the center’s students. A percentage similar to that achieved by the support classes of other centers, which usually reserve them for students with greater difficulties and, normally, only in the first and second year of ESO.
The efforts of the administrators
There are other autonomous communities that finance this type of course, such as Castilla y León and Euskadi. And the Ministry of Education itself does it through the PROA+ program. Despite this, in many institutes free extracurricular activities are offered thanks to the commitment of their managers, the collaboration of teachers – sometimes external to the center or even volunteers – and after having overcome, in public education, the rigid timetable frameworks of the centres.
In the Ramón y Cajal Institute in Albacete, for example, its director, Carlos Galdón, was able to start the project thanks to the fact that one of the janitors had a part-time contract and by using volunteer students from the Faculty of Education as review teachers. And in the Virgen del Remedio in Alicante, its director, Mar Sierra, achieved this result by taking advantage of the fact that the institute had teachers of the Professional Training cycle in the afternoon. Since this year the provision of vocational training in her neighborhood was concentrated in another institution, and she no longer has one, Sierra managed to get out of the situation by hiring a teacher with funds from the Ministry of Education. But he had to reduce the number of student participants from 40 to 20, and reduce its scope to ESO’s first year.
