2023 began with an important milestone for San Pablo CEU: the celebration of its 90 years as a charitable-teaching foundation involved in the comprehensive training of its students and teaching values for their growth as people. Now, with the end of the year, it is time to take stock and reflect on the educational challenges facing 2024.
Among these objectives are the strengthening of continuous training and the certification of skills, the attraction of international talent, the adaptation to the new Vocational Training model and the creation of quality educational content, as well as the responsible management of new technologies in classrooms and mental health promotion.
The CEU currently has in Spain the CEU San Pablo University of Madrid, the CEU Cardenal Herrera University of Valencia, the CEU Abat Oliba University of Barcelona, and the recent CEU Fernando III University of Seville. It is the educational group with the largest volume at the national level, since in total it has 25 educational centers distributed in 11 cities.
Today's labor market requires that “young people be technically very good, that they be good people and that they have humanistic training,” explains Javier Tello, general director of the San Pablo CEU Foundation. Given this need, a new challenge opens up: “getting the humanities to enter as a key social piece in comprehensive education.”
In this environment of constant transformation, in which new profiles emerge that require different competencies and skills - among them, soft skills -, cooperation between University and Company is key to eliminating the existing gap and promoting employability. In this sense, the Foundation highlights microcredentials, a certification model that accredits the skills that employers demand from university students in their selection processes and also encourages their permanent and updated learning. An example of this is the agreement signed between PwC Spain and CEU to launch Work Academy, a pioneering project that will allow the experience of its professionals to be accredited for the first time in Europe with two university diplomas and a master's degree.
“The students who come to our classrooms today are different from those of a few years ago,” says Coral Barba, Coordinator of Universities, and adds: “We are defining the model of the graduated student.” To do this, it is necessary to know in depth what the students who arrive are like and accompany them in this process.
“We want to establish support at two levels: academic and professional,” explains Barba. All of this with the aim of training ethical professionals, good people and with a series of skills that enable them to be employable. In this way, classroom training must integrate “knowing how to do (knowledge), knowing how to be (competences) and knowing how to be (values),” she says.
The objective of Vocational Training is to provide the business fabric of a country with the talent, training and qualifications necessary to cover medium and medium-higher level employment. Therefore, the approach they are taking from the San Pablo CEU Foundation is to create solid alliances with the local business community. “In the end, what it is about is returning Vocational Training to its initial mission: providing local business networks with the necessary technicians to develop their activity,” says Luis Martínez-Abarca, director of the Foundation's Vocational Training Area.
As Luis Martínez-Abarca, director of the Foundation's Vocational Training Area, points out, the growth of Vocational Training is “slow, but sustained in recent years.” And the student profile also stands out: it is increasingly common to see Vocational Training students who come from the university world, and seek to reorient their career or find new opportunities. Among the most chosen sectors are those related to computing, technologies or administration; while the industrial part is the one with the fewest students and "the one where they are most needed."
“Now the world of schools is somewhat complex,” says Raül Adames, director of CEU's Schools Area, in relation to the paradigm shift in the educational world, which is also transferred to the school environment. That is why from this area they work to strengthen the centers in two main axes: academic content and socialization.
Rich academic content “is the basic tool of the teacher and is essential for a school to function and for us to be able to accompany the students in an organic way,” says Adames, who has also announced the generation of its own content by the Foundation, through the creation of textbooks of History, Literature, Religion and Philosophy. Thus, they hope to have their own editorial line “in three or four years,” he estimates.
Regarding the socialization axis, the emotional-sexual education programs stand out, which focus on the early consumption and abuse of pornography among adolescents; and the Mentis Program, focused on providing a professional response to mental health problems with a high incidence among children and adolescents, such as eating disorders, anxiety, depression, self-harming ideas or substance abuse. “The objective is for us to do such great prevention work that we ensure that no cases occur in our classrooms,” he says.
