The Revolving School Gate

Here are some figures for you. In the Balearics for the school year 2012-2013 there were 40,615 children registered with the public education system for infant schooling, 66,123 for primary schools and 40,728 for obligatory secondary schooling. The numbers, by comparison with some other regions of Spain, are not huge. Catalonia, for instance, had over 450,000 primary school children during the same school year, but then Catalonia is a much bigger place and has a much larger total population. The numbers, though, are not really what matters, it is quality of education that does.

The Balearics underperforms in the PISA measures of student assessment - maths, reading comprehension and sciences. PISA, the programme for international student assessment of fifteen-year-olds, consistently ranks the Balearics among the worst-performing regions of Spain along with other regular underachievers at the bottom of the class - Andalusia, Extremadura and Murcia. Not all regions participate in this assessment; the Canaries, for example. But were that region to be included, one wonders if it might not show similar underperformance to that of the Balearics.

A peculiar aspect of this performance is that the Balearics is one of Spain's wealthier regions in terms of contribution to GDP. The implication of comparative affluence should mean, by a typically assigned equation between wealth and education, that performance would be stronger. In poorer regions, such as Andalusia and Extremadura, educational underperformance is perhaps more understandable, but Andalusia (and so the Costa del Sol and other tourism regions) also faces an issue in common with the Balearics - the transitory nature of some of its school student population.

Thus far during the school year 2014-2015, almost 2,400 pupils have been removed from primary schools in the Balearics. It is lower than the figure for the previous school year - 7,000 - but it is still a substantial number. The pupils have abandoned the Balearic public education system because their families have either moved to a different part of Spain or abroad. These include Spanish (Mallorcan) families and those from other countries, who have gone in search of better employment prospects or have simply decided to go back home. At the same time, however, the Balearics is one of only two regions to show a slight increase in total population - workers and their families continue to come to the island for tourism employment or in the hope of a better life.

Before the economic crisis hit, inward population movement was of such a level that the school population rose substantially. This created all manner of difficulties: finding space for the pupils and also being able to deliver an adequate standard of education. Despite the slowdown that crisis brought about, the Balearics still has an inordinately high number of foreign pupils. The national average is 9%. In the Balearics it is 19%. This percentage, though, is regularly shifting in terms of its components. There is, if you like, a constantly revolving school gate of pupils coming in and going out, mostly all of them originally from elsewhere in Spain or from abroad.

The strains and difficulties that this turnover create should not be underestimated. Generally, and although the teaching profession in the Balearics does not seek to use it as an excuse or as meaning that school "failure" is inevitable, researchers at the university in Palma question whether the public education system is capable of compensating for the disadvantages that can be faced by foreign pupils and whether indeed the system is "truly inclusive and promotes educational equality". Though it is not always wise to take anecdotal evidence as proof, I have heard from parents of foreign pupils who imply that their children are not discriminated against by teachers so much as not treated with adequate respect and seriousness and so not granted sufficient attention to their needs. These anecdotes may, though, lend support to what the university researchers are saying. (By way of balance, it should be noted that there are anecdotes which suggest the opposite.)

When one weighs all the factors up, it isn't perhaps surprising that overall educational performance is as low as it is. What isn't revealed by the researchers' studies is the contribution that foreign pupils make to a lowering of general performance (though statistics on repeating might well give a clue), but regardless of this, there are still 81% of pupils who find themselves in a system that underperforms. The shifting school population is surely a factor in this underperformance but only one.

Balearic governments do not help the situation by their movement of linguistic goalposts, but then nor - some of the time - do the teachers. LOMCE, the national law for improving educational qualities, has its many critics, but if its fundamental objective is improvement, why are teachers in the Balearics going on strike on 19 May in opposition to testing that is being introduced for third-grade primary schoolchildren?