The draft Education Act to be discussed this autumn in Parliament does not need amendments, it has to be retired. The project is privatization and does not want to solve the main problem of the system (which, being dual, is a continuous generating segregation). This is because the ideological line of the bill is based on two false equations.

The first false equation: anyone offering public service must be considered public and entitled to funding if conditions are met.

The present draft Law on Education aims to promote a new Basque Public Educational Service, “materialized through public and private centers, with the requirements established in this law and in its regulatory development”. He adds: “Concerted centres teaching within the Basque Public Educational Service will be fully funded.” And what are those requirements to be part of this service and be 100 percent funded? None is specified in the project. There are no conditions, the principles of belonging to the ESP are so diffuse that in practice universal consultation is perpetuated, including centres that do not inject and indoctrinate.

The concerted network has never fulfilled the conditions established by the regulations on Educational Concerts regarding quotas, access of students and secularism. Since 1987, it has not complied with the principles of gratuity and secularity. Are you going to do it now?

The Education Bill is based on the thesis that both networks are complementary, because both offer a public service. Thus, equips the public with the private ("You have to go beyond what can be public and private", Jokin Bildarratz, February 2022, Onda Cero). This bill collects the historical claim of the private network and becomes a privatizing law. It is disappointing to see the leftist parties assume the thesis of this “public service”.

We are clear that the centre that wants 100% funding must publish it.

Second false equation: being free concerted centers, school segregation ends.

The second equation indicates that the gratuity of the concerted centers would automatically imply inclusion, since all students could register in any public or private center, thus reducing the rate of school segregation generated by our dual educational system. Thus, the parties defending this bill purchase the historic demand for concerted education, that is, that the private network cannot be free for lack of sufficient funding, and consider that segregation occurs because the most disadvantaged families do not go to these centres because they cannot cope with their quotas. Once free, they would go and the problem would be over. Easy, right?

But concerted centres will never be free, because this goes against their identity and the need to differentiate themselves from the public network. It depends and commands the market. Statements by private education employers have been clear: "The concerted centres of the Basque Country ask for an additional EUR 1,500 to Education per student to eliminate the fees", "the ikastolas must maintain the necessary quotas to secure funding". And so said Counsellor Bildarratz: “The concerted centres will not be able to collect any fees that we finance, but they will be able to collect the accounts that we do not enter, that we will regulate.” In other words, it will continue to be charged for other educational "services". These statements show that the concerted centres will no longer be free to continue to self-finance and collect covertly and exclude families who cannot afford to pay. To think otherwise is innocence or complicity on the part of those who defend the bill.

No, although there is such gratuitousness that we will never see, the problem of school segregation would not be solved, because there are other factors that prevent many families from going to these centers (social, continuous activity payments, confessionality of the center...). Proposing the gratuitousness of the concerted centres to end segregation is a simplistic and false measure, it has not worked in Catalonia (hence the idea has been imported), and it will not work in the CAPV, because it addresses the symptom and not the cause of segregation, which is the huge proportion of the private network.

These two false equations are intended to build the future Education Act for the next 30 years. Introduce fraud into schools for another 30 years. As before, they want us to impose a law to maintain a dual system based on imbalance, set aside the public network and fill the private network with public money. That is why we say that this draft needs no amendment and must be retired.

by Estibaliz Magrach Pardo, Eneko Sierra Ortiz de Urbina