The Ministry of Education and Vocational Training could come to the “rescue” from this month of September of the charter school, where 33% of the students studyfinding themselves in a “compromising situation”, according to Catholic Schools. On the one hand, due to the low birth rate, which means a drop in the number of students of up to 30%, which has caused a small trickle of school closures, an issue on which “it is urgent to take measures”, says Luis Centeno, deputy general secretary of Catholic Schools; on the other hand, it is urgent to address the economic situation.
The centres are already suffering from the lower purchasing power of families due to inflation and this means that they are obtaining less extraordinary income from complementary services that they have been offering (psychological counselling, sale of books, uniforms, voluntary financial contributions from families…). “The situation is worrying because there is no financial margin and the centres are keeping their fingers crossed that there will be no major incidents that require disbursements,” Centeno points out.
Throughout the month of September, the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training plans to create technical tables with a schedule of negotiations so that an analysis of the situation can be made. This would be the first time that the state of the concerted school has been addressed since the time of the former socialist minister Ángel Gabilondo. One of the issues to be negotiated will be the updating of the modules of the concerts, that is, the money that the concerted school receives from the State. And it is that if in the public The Administration spends 7,899 euros per student, in the concerted system the amount does not reach 3,000according to the average that is handled.
What remains to be seen is to what extent this State contribution to private schools will be increased, as it considers that for each classroom of students it accumulates a deficit of 4,000 euros.
“We accept that funding is slightly higher in the public sector, because there are rural areas with few students who need to be educated, but we cannot accept that it is allocated twice as much as in the public sector. We must not accept that the Administration pays half of what it should and that families have to help voluntarily,” Centeno stresses.The Ministry of Education seems willing to update the financial contributionand it is not even ruled out that it will create a new regulation at the state level with the concert modules, but it intends that this economic update be accompanied by the elimination of voluntary quotas for families and the admission of a greater quota of immigrants in these centers, which it now considers insufficient. The concerted, however, affirms that it works to be inclusive, as is confirmed in many centers, but attributes a lower quota of immigrants in many of them to economic and social factors.
The salary of teachers in these schools is another issue pending updating, an issue burdened by the lack of Budgets in 2023. This meant that only one rule could be published on the salary increase for civil servants, which also applies to teachers, and which in that year was 3.5%. However, The salary increase has been uneven in the autonomous communities. While Aragon has made it effective for teachers from the private sector in the August payroll, Murcia, for example, has not done so. Something similar happens in 2024. Some have regularized their salary and others have not, depending on the autonomous region.
Pending matter
This “rescue” of the charter school is not an improvised decision. It was already established in the additional provision 29 of the LOE, approved in 2006, an obligation that was pending and that has been modified and expanded by the Lomloe, the current socialist education law. It establishes that The Ministry of Education must set up a Commission to study the cost of school places and adapt the modules of concerts that appear published in the General State Budget Law to the real cost.
Both the Administration and the centres are aware that the current module of agreement per unit is obsolete and is deficient for the entities that own it, many of them religious organisations. In 2010, Ángel Gabilondo promoted the implementation of this commission when he was Minister of Education, but he did not finish his work due to the early elections of 2011 (Rodríguez Zapatero). Neither the PP nor the PSOE governments have resumed the work until now, when the conditions would have to be negotiated. Meanwhile, the concerted schools breathe a sigh of relief when they see that article 109 of the Lomloe on the “social demand” has not been applied in the majority of the autonomous communities, which generated controversy as it was seen as a threat to the survival of this educational model.