Catalan schools must manage 9,000 new students each month.

BarcelonaStarting next year, the Department of Education plans to incorporate historical enrollment figures—students who enter a school or secondary school after the school year has already begun and registration has closed—into the school place planning process for each region. The development was announced this Monday by the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, in a parliamentary committee after making public a key piece of data: since the start of the 2024-2025 school year, up to 74,328 new students have entered the Catalan education system outside of the regular enrollment period. This is 11,000 more children and adolescents than those who arrived last year.

This figure means that, considering we are eight months into the school year, on average Catalan schools and secondary schools must manage more than 9,000 new students each month. "It is a reality that we can no longer consider exceptional and that we must take into account," said Niubó. However, for the moment, the Education Ministry has not specified which schools are receiving these thousands of students, nor where they come from. That is, it has not been made public whether they are students who have changed schools or municipalities, or if they are newly arrived students.

Niubó only gave an approximate example of the students who enroll in an intermediate year (which is neither I3 nor 1st year of ESO, the courses in which families usually register) in Barcelona: "More than a quarter of the applications submitted for pre-registration for the next year have been for intermediate years." She added that the majority are cases of changing schools within the same municipality and that 25 percent "are due to changes of students coming from other parts of the country or from outside."

The figure given by the minister this Monday is much higher than the estimate that the Department of Education itself had made mid-year, to which ARA has had access. As of February, the Education Ministry estimated that Catalan schools and secondary schools had received approximately 12,160 new students, which placed the monthly average at approximately 2,000 new students per month.

According to this initial calculation made by the government mid-year, the year with the highest number of new students was the first year of compulsory secondary education (ESO), with 1,553 more students than at the beginning of the year. This was followed by the first year of compulsory education (I3), with 1,424, and the fourth and fifth years of primary school, both with more than a thousand new students compared to the number registered at the beginning of the year. In any case, by February all school years in Catalonia (pre-school, primary, and secondary) had welcomed more than 700 new students. The only exception is the 4th year of ESO, but in this case it must be taken into account that, as this is the last year of secondary school, many newly arrived students are advised to opt for other options, as they will have very little time to graduate.

For all these reasons, Niubó has warned that if these almost 75,000 students who have arrived in the classrooms with the course already started are not taken into account, there could be negative consequences in terms of school segregation: "If we did not take this new reality into account when designing the initial offer of the ordinary registration period, we would find ourselves with a poorly distributed offer, which ends up favoring the concentration of vulnerable students in certain centers and perpetuating imbalances that as a system we cannot allow."

Warnings about this have been raised for some time.

Although Educació released the data this Monday, several schools had been sounding the alarm for some time because they saw that the number of students they were admitting once the school year had started was growing and they couldn't keep up. "At the beginning of the school year, it was a trickle, but from January to March, we had to manage an avalanche of new students," criticizes Jordi Barberan, the director of the Salesians Rocafort school in Barcelona. He explains that, in his case, a dozen students arrived from abroad in just two weeks. "Being from abroad, they carry a very heavy emotional burden. These are very complex cases. They don't speak Catalan, Spanish, or English, and their financial situation is very difficult." He asserts that they are shorthanded because they are students who "can't just slide into the mainstream." "The situation is unsustainable, and schools are unable to provide the support these boys and girls need, neither academically nor personally," he laments.

The Bofill Foundation also insists that this situation has been known for some time: "The overall figure is very large. We are at record levels of student arrivals, not only from abroad, but also from the rest of the state and also mobility within Catalonia itself," warns the SEGR expert. She explains that city councils have been noticing this situation for some time, but that at the national level "it is being managed in a very improvised manner" and that all of this ends up having a very significant impact on school segregation in Catalonia. "The trend so far has been to assign these students to the school with the most vacancies, which is usually the most complex school, or one that already has a reception classroom," she criticizes.

Segurola's words are corroborated by Víctor, a teacher at a highly complex school and member of the Clam Educatiu collective. "We are a highly complex school, and we have a lot of vulnerability within our classrooms. Bringing in new students affects us greatly because we already have so many fronts to address. In the end, a new student arrives at a place where there are already many problems, and that means they may receive less support," she warns.

Closure of lines in the concerted

Beyond the current enrollment data, in his appearance in Parliament, Niubó also spoke about the closure of private schools. The closure of the enrollment period is expected to begin. Specifically, the proposal is to close 101 preschool units, 44 primary schools, and 10 secondary schools.