Juan Carlos de los Santos repeated the second year of ESO, and by the middle of third year, when he was only going to high school sporadically, he seemed to have all the signs of academic failure. “I was broke, basically, because I wasn’t doing anything with my life. And entering Basic FP gave me a mental turnaround. I went from being unmotivated and not wanting to study, to looking forward to the next day so I could go to class and continue learning.” De los Santos, 21 years old, resident of Los Palacios and Villafranca (Seville), had always liked to assemble and dismantle devices. But thanks to the basic degree in Electricity at a public institute and the teachers he found there, he discovered, he says, a passion. He completed the two-year studies that gave him a compulsory secondary school diploma. He enrolled in a middle grade from the same family, which he finished with an outstanding grade. And then in a higher degree, which he is finishing and combines with work in his own small business, mobile phone repair, which opened in the summer and has allowed him to become independent with his girlfriend, while he prepares to appear in June for the Selectivity of those who come from Vocational Training to study a career in Robotics Engineering.
De los Santos is one of the nearly 23,000 students who complete Basic FP each year, an educational itinerary that combines an academic and a professional part, designed for those who seem destined to stop studying without even obtaining an ESO degree. It is normally accessed at 15 years old. And a good part of them drop out: according to data published last week by the Ministry of Education, only 50.4% manage to graduate four years after enrolling. A percentage 1.3 points better than a year before, which is still far from the one with the average degree of FP (64.3%) and the highest one (75.3%). For many, however, like De los Santos and the other three young people interviewed in this report, it helps them re-engage and successfully progress in their studies. Seven out of every 10 basic grade students (78,000 in total) are boys. Most come from working-class homes (De los Santos’s father is a metal carpenter, and his mother is a housewife and seamstress). And a part has lived on the edge or fully in social exclusion, with very complicated family and personal situations.
Juanjo Alcalá has been teaching in public education for 34 years, almost always in institutes in Albacete, and 10 of them in Basic Vocational Training. “From my experience, it is a student body that usually arrives with very low self-esteem, and that is the first thing that needs to be worked on. They come from failing in ESO because, due to one circumstance or another, they have not known how to adapt to the system or the system to them. In general, they have gone through bad educational experiences; they may have had repeated expulsions from class or truancy. Typically, they have been stigmatized as bad students. And they need other stimuli, other methodologies, more practical and interactive content. In my case, they are the students with whom I have had the most satisfaction working.” Even more than at other levels, with them he had to learn to be a bit of a “psychologist and pedagogue, to sometimes leave the contents in the background and act in other fields.” “I acquired tools that my academic training had not given me, and that have helped me teach at other educational levels,” he says.
One of her students was Alba Calderón, 21, who is now finishing her higher degree in Administration and Finance. The daughter of a military man and a domestic worker, before arriving in Albacete at the age of 10, she had already lived in four provinces. In the second year of ESO she failed nine subjects, she repeated, and became convinced that she was not going to be able to finish high school. “At that time I didn’t like studying. She saw everything as complicated. She told me: ‘I’m not going to be able to.’ And when I started basic vocational training, I found some teachers who helped you, motivated you, and since they were less in class, they could pay more attention to you,” she says. In the basic grade groups there are, on average, 12.1 students (compared to 24.9 in ESO), according to data from the Ministry of Education. With large differences by community, ranging from 8.2 in Extremadura to 15.3 in Madrid. Calderón later graduated with honors in a medium-level vocational training at the Leonardo da Vinci Institute in Albacete, and in March she will begin higher-level business internships.
The perspective of basic vocational training makes us reconsider what educational success is, says Roberto García, coordinator of the Cooperativa Peñascal, a non-profit entity that emerged in the eighties in Euskadi in which more than 500 students study the stage. “Many say it means going to university, but first of all it means that a person achieves work and life inclusion.” Christian Olfos, 23 years old, raised in Otxarkoaga, one of the lowest-income neighborhoods in Bilbao, went through the cooperative’s classrooms. His parents, a bricklayer and sweeper, separated when he was five years old, and as a child he suffered the violence that some of her mother’s partners used against her. “I saw many things at home that were not… I was in a juvenile center, I ran away, at 15 I ended up living on the street, and I am very grateful for the help of the teachers and family members who helped me get out of it.” well,” he says. Olfos did a Basic FP and then an intermediate degree in Welding. While he was studying, he placed fifth in a competition in his specialty organized by Talgo and the CSIC among hundreds of students from various parts of Spain, and shortly afterward he was hired. “Now I have a permanent contract, a house, a partner. I live happily,” he says.
Learn another way
One of the pending objectives, says Clara Sanz, general secretary of FP, is that basic degrees stop being considered second-class studies and begin to be seen as a path “for students who learn in another way.” “I,” says Olfos, who repeated his grades in primary school and ESO, “felt uncomfortable being in a chair for so many hours. I noticed that it was made for more practical things.” And Ilyas Laktaoui, 21, who came to Spain with his parents from Morocco when he was two, and repeated secondary school before switching to the basic grade in Albacete, adds: “In ESO I had subjects that may be important, but that I They seemed like a world to me, like Biology or History. On the other hand, when I entered the IT vocational training I liked it right away.” Laktaoui (father, mechanic; mother, housewife) later completed an intermediate degree, and is now finishing the six-month internship period of the higher degree in a multinational, where he is almost sure that he will stay working.
Reducing to reasonable levels the great abandonment that the basic degree presents teachers “very specialized in this type of student”, and increase and diversify the public offer, in which there are now enormous territorial contrasts, with Cantabria, where basic education can be studied in the majority of institutes, at one extreme, and Catalonia, where There are few places in the other. “In L’Hospitalet, for example, the second most populated city in Catalonia, there are only two basic FPs, and they are also very biased by gender. One, at the institute where I teach, Metal, where practically only boys go, and another, at another institute, hairdressing, where practically only girls go.”
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