This Wednesday, September 6th, students from compulsory preschool, primary and secondary education in Catalonia return to classrooms with a forecast of 1,052,623 students. The 2023-2024 school year begins with fewer students, due to the decline in births in recent years, and an increase in the teaching staff of nearly 1,200 professors and teachers. This will bring the number of teachers to 81,335, the highest figure reached so far.
Another of the novelties of the course is the 100 euro school voucher campaign for the purchase of textbooks and school supplies. 357,456 families have already made use of this aid, 80% of the total. The aim of this initiative is to mitigate the rise in the price of expenses related to schooling and to mitigate the impact of the increase in the cost of living on families.
The free kindergarten 2 is implemented for the second year in a row with the aim of promoting family reconciliation and benefiting students at the earliest ages. In fact, the increase in students aged 0-3 was 3.1 points last school year compared to the previous year (2021-2022), the first year of implementation of the free admission.
On the other hand, this year begins the second year of reducing the ratios to Kindergarten 3 with 4,335 groups of the Catalan Education Service - adding I3 and I4 - with a ratio of a maximum of 20 students per classroom. In I3 it is 86% of the percentage of the public school and 66% of the charter school.
The Generalitat continues to implement the measures of the Plan against school segregation, and, in this sense, allocates 80 million euros for this school year to the most vulnerable students in Kindergarten 3, Kindergarten 4, and 1st and 2nd 'ESO. This figure represents almost double the investment compared to last year.
Regarding the inclusive school, Education is investing 25 million euros more than the previous budget, with the addition of 355 new professionals. In the field of co-education and coexistence, the figure of the referent for co-education, coexistence and emotional well-being is launched with more than 3,400 referents, one for each educational centre.
The 2023-2024 school year will be the first school year without funding with public funds in centers that segregate by gender in compulsory secondary education.
As a novelty this year, Catalonia will have 9 new public educational centres, two schools, two high schools and five high schools. These are the Vallcarca Institute (Barcelona), the Nou Alcarràs Institute (Segrià), the Badia del Vallès Nova School, the Campllong School, the Badia del Vallès School Institute, the Feixes School Institute ( Terrassa), El Cabrerès School Institute (L'Esquirol), Mossèn Joan Batlle School Institute (Blanes), Josep Pous i Pagès School Institute (Figueres).
Also integrated are four centers so far arranged in the public network of the Department of Education: Institut Escola Manresa, Institut Escola Sant Felip Neri (Barcelona), Escola Segre (Barcelona), and Institut Escola Cent Fonts-Sant Josep (Sant Hilari Sacalm ). With these integrations, more than 1,700 new places are gained for public education.
Measures to promote Catalan in schools and institutes continue, and new ones are being implemented. A total of 800 centers will be trained in the ULAE workshops on language use in the educational field and ten measures will be deployed to deal with the decline in the use of Catalan at school. At the same time, 50 centers are starting the pilot plan for improving school libraries to encourage the reading habit and reading in Catalan.
