The Minister of Education, Anna Simó, participates in the Pere Tarrés Social Forum and announces a shock plan for the sector
The role of educational leisure activities as opportunities for learning and social justice was the central theme of the Pere Tarrés Social Forum, which was held on Thursday 29 February. This space for reflection and debate, promoted by the Pere Tarrés Foundation, was attended by the Minister of Education of the Generalitat, Anna Simó, as speaker. The minister expressed her concern for the educational inequalities that occur outside the school environment and presented a shock plan to enhance educational leisure “with more resources, more recognition and a more inclusive vision”.
“The growth and development of children is not limited to what happens in the classroom,” said the minister. “Activities outside the classroom contribute to the formation of the person not only from the perspective of acquiring knowledge, but also from the areas of health, values and emotions,” he added.
The educational gap outside of school
The councilor lamented that, despite a universal school, the main educational inequalities occur precisely in leisure time: “In school, students are a priori equal and have the same opportunities to learn, but what happens outside the school? For me, this is the great current educational gap and from the department we want to promote equal opportunities in access to educational leisure to face it. This will be one of the most relevant policies that we will promote, together with the fight against school segregation.”
For this reason, Simó announced a full-time education plan that the Government will deploy between now and 2030 and that must be based “on the pedagogical continuum between the different educational spaces and on coordination with all the agents of the sector, connecting inside and outside the school”. To make this plan effective, he asked for the complicity of the social and educational entities attending the event: “We count on third sector entities. We can’t and don’t want to do it alone, we need your experience and values.”
The midday space, an educational space and an essential service
In the same vein, he claimed the midday space as “an educational space and an essential service for families” and announced that his department will improve the support monitoring management system “to revalue this professional figure”.
The need for social policies for a better school
The minister linked the need to improve schools with the fight against poverty and social exclusion: “Educational policies must be accompanied by social policies. We will only improve academic results if we also improve economic and social indicators, and the recent data on child poverty is a punch in the stomach, an injustice that challenges us and that we must fight.”
In this sense, he emphasized that the budgets include 35 million euros for the inclusive school and 5% more investment (410 euros more) per child. They also foresee an increase of 43 million euros in dining allowances. Unfortunately, Simó acknowledged that this increase in resources “will not reach everyone as it should” because the system “does not yet have the necessary robustness”.
Other initiatives: access to art and culture and the promotion of the Catalan language
During his speech, he also announced other initiatives, such as a project to make access to art and culture universal, and thanked the leisure organizations for their commitment to promoting the Catalan language, “which is a social question of equal opportunities for all”.
