School, families and community networking against early school leaving: theoretical tenets and learnings from a catalan experience

Abstract

As research has amply shown, early school leaving (ESL) has a significant present and future impact on the life of young people (OECD, 2016: Tarabini & Curran, 2018, UE, 2011; Van Houtte & Van Maele, 2012; among others). In the present, because their school experience is negative, it can have a clear impact on their self-esteem, their self-concept and their academic and work expectations. And in the future, it makes a difference because ESL correlates very strongly with a high probability of poverty in adult life, poorer health, less satisfying work and a less participatory social and political life, among others (Tarabini & Ingram, 2018). Failure to obtain official qualifications after compulsory schooling is a burden on the personal, educational and professional development of young people that can only be combatted with, precisely, more and better education. When the education system fails to get every student to learn and continue studying, what is called school failure, it has significant negative consequences for the school experience and the future of young people. It is school failure that is the failure of the education system that, as has been known for decades, affects young children of disadvantaged families far more, thus contributing to the generational reproduction of social inequalities (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970). Contrary to the meritocratic proclamation that links school success to individual effort alone, research in many countries has shown that the education system tends to have deep problems in reaching equality in education, which is in turn related to the inequality axes of social class, gender or migrant background, among others (Arnot, 1981; Ball, 2003; Bernstein, 1988; Bourdieu, 1980; Fernandez Enguita et al., 2010; Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Lareau, 2003; Reay, 2018; Rist, 2000; Sandel, 2020; Willis 1977: etc). For, as the pupils at the Barbiana School forcefully reminded us in an open letter to the Italian government, shortly before the death of their teacher, the priest Lorenzo Milani, in 1967: <the school is a hospital that tends to the healthy and rejects the sick. It becomes just a device to strengthen the existing differences to a point of no return= (Alumnes Escola Barbiana,1998, P. 14). These students, who had experienced a truly inclusive school where <no one was denied education= (p.6), denounced from their own experience a selective and segregated education system. To answer these questions, in the second section of this article we briefly describe the phenomenon of ESL in the context of Spain, Catalonia and the county of Osona from a historical perspective, and then focus on the current COVID-19 pandemic situation. And in the third section, we propose a socio-educational, holistic and shared perspective that can connect schools, families and communities together in a network in order to combat ESL, and present the Enxaneta project as experiences of prevention of school failure in the county of Osona.