During the economic crisis, families stopped buying clothes, resigned restaurants and rationed visits to the supermarket.
But they did not dispense with the particular classes, to which 24% of Spanish students resort and that they suppose families an average disbursement of 751 euros per year.
“It has gone from luxury well to product of first necessity,” says Juan Manuel Moreno, main education specialist at the World Bank and Professor of Didactics and School Organization of the UNED.
Moreno is the author of the first study that estimates the weight in Spain of non-formal education, a non-regulated private sector that does not issue diplomas and which is often within the submerged economy.
The work, which Thursday publishes the Think Tank ESADEECPOL, shows that spending is growing sustained, even during the crisis, and that it has more and more weight in the family budget.
In a decade, it has tripled: of the 246 million euros that supposed in 2006 has passed to 732 million in 2017.
We are not like in China, but “the trend seems to point to an increasing demand in all homes, reflecting an increasingly widespread awareness in all social classes that investing in particular classes could function as a condition to ensure access to opportunities
From the future of children, “says the investigation.
Moreno has surprised him that where the spending is most proportionally in homes with medium and medium-low rents.
Why?
“Families could be lowering their confidence regarding the formal school and resorting to private classes because they give them an additional advantage to their children they do not find elsewhere. The rich families also think so, but its starting point was taller because
They are the ones that spend the most in classes, “he says.
Among the factors that may be accelerating the demand in Spain are “the increasing perception that the quality of the schools has dropped” and “the growing distrust in public institutions, including schools, in a context of growing politicization of the educational sector and
of democratic recession “.
Also the “high rates of failure and repetition”, a “generalized climate of competitiveness by entering the university” and the fact that families have fewer children, which “allows them to invest more in each of them” and, about
Everything, compensate for the time they do not have “to help them with school tasks”.
“This work confirms that the authentic educational revolution is that families are taking the reins of their children’s educational itineraries, the school is still an important place, but its role is diminishing. The sources of knowledge are transforming and, if the family
He does not find at school what he needs, goes to Private Initiative, “reflects Professor Gregorio Luri, who recalls that parent associations” have more agility than other institutions “when observing social changes.
He quotes, for example, the case of robotics: the AMPA were the first to become extracurricular, long before schools did.
The Study of Moreno recalls that there are more and more agencies and seekers of particular teachers.
Mathematics suppose 65% of the sector, which focuses on “recovering and reinforcing and more than expanding and perfecting”.
Luri says that they are alreadyfered extra-schives focused exclusively on organizing the child’s agenda.
“If the parents are willing to spend the money on this is because children need it.”
