Barcelona students from vulnerable backgrounds have improved their academic results on average since 2020, and school abandonment and segregation have also reduced. These are some of the results from the Educational Opportunities Report 2024 prepared by Institut Metròpoli, commissioned by the City Council, and conducted every two years since 2016.
In a context of general decline in academic results across Catalonia and Barcelona in all competencies – mathematics, linguistics (Catalan, Spanish and English), natural environment and scientific-technical – according to PISA tests, Barcelona has obtained significantly higher results than the Catalan average, especially in primary education. According to the study, students in vulnerable situations residing in Barcelona have experienced a quite significant improvement (6 points on average) in academic results compared to the 2020-2021 academic year. It’s a positive advance from an educational equity perspective.
Barcelona education results show early years expansion
Another factor that’s contributed to improving educational equity is the expansion of theoretical coverage for schooling for 0 to 3-year-olds. This has gone from 18.5% in the 2013-2014 academic year to 26.3% in the 2024-2025 academic year. This is partly explained because about ten new schools with around a thousand places have opened in the last decade.
Despite this increase in places, across the city the rate of demand met in nursery schools stood at around 66% in the 2024-2025 academic year. That is, one in three families requesting a place in a nursery school can’t enrol their child. However, this situation varies according to districts. For example, whilst in Sant Martí the rate of demand met for 0 to 2-year-olds is 73.5%, in Eixample the demand met is 35.6%.
Secondary education improvements
The study’s section focused on post-compulsory secondary education shows increased access to post-compulsory secondary education, especially in medium-level vocational training cycles. This fact is associated with the reduction in early school leaving compared to data from a decade ago – a decrease observed in both Catalonia (14.8% of young people aged 16 to 24) and Barcelona (7.7%).
Regarding school segregation, the dissimilarity index measuring it has dropped substantially between the 2020-2021 and 2023-2024 academic years. In early childhood and primary education, it fell from 0.49 to 0.39, and in secondary education, from 0.44 to 0.34. They’ve attributed this reduction to the implementation of the Shock Plan against school segregation promoted by the Barcelona Education Consortium (2021) and the Admissions Decree (2021), which have had moderate but significant impacts.
The report also shows a reduction in repeating students in second-cycle early childhood, primary and ESO education, and an increase in ESO graduates. This is especially evident in public centres, where repetition of 4th ESO students has reduced by 5.5 percentage points (from 19.6% in 2021-2022 to 14.1% in 2023-2024). That same year, 75.3% progressed without pending subjects (above Catalonia’s 71.1%).
Nevertheless, the study also notes that students in situations of socioeconomic vulnerability and foreign nationality maintain negative indicators in repetition and graduation. To reverse this situation, administrations have launched projects such as welcome classrooms, the transformation of centres into school-institutes, the boost to Municipal Schools of Second Opportunities, and the integration of social educators in educational centres, amongst other measures.
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