Abstract:

The Goal 4 of the 2030 global sustainable development agenda (SDG) aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all to promote a more sustainable future. To this end, one of the specific objectives set by the European Education Area’s strategic framework aims to reduce the European Union (EU) average share of early school leaving (ESL) to less than 9% by 2030. Despite significant improvements in recent years, Spain with a rate of 13.7% ESL in 2023 (the second highest rate in the EU), is still far from reaching this figure. If we look at the situation of students with migrant background, the figures in Spain are even more worrying. The share of students who leave education and training early is significantly higher for young migrants (a rate of 33% in 2023) than for nationals. This situation shows that far from being a natural phenomenon, ESL is produced by a certain “grammar of schooling” that intervenes in the making of success and failure in school.

This paper presents the results of a research developed in the framework of an international project funded by the Spencer Foundation as part of its Racial Equity Research Grants. The project explores how structural inequities against young people with a migrant background operate in different educational contexts, and how to ameliorate them via equitable education policies and practices.

The selection of countries and cases to comprise the field of research was based on three main criteria:
1) places with significant migratory flows and with specific characteristics,
2) particularly vulnerable and racially stigmatized migrant profiles or groups in each context, and
3) institutions where educational practices and actions are currently promoted, to contribute to reducing the educational inequities affecting migrant young people.

The case study developed in Spain addressed concerns associated with the higher levels of ESL among racialized and minoritized young people with migrant background. Considering that ESL has a multidimensional nature that can be explained through social, systemic, institutional, relational, and subjective factors, the main objective of the case was to approach the educational trajectory of young people of migrant origin to analyze the factors that have led to the premature interruption of secondary compulsory schooling.

The case study developed within a second chance school of the city of Barcelona seeks to:
a) approach the schooling trajectory of young people of migrant origin to know their lived experiences of school (dis)affection and in this way to delve into the mechanisms of production of exclusion by educational policies and practices and
b) identify educational strategies, procedures and practices of re-engaging young people into a virtuous circle of learning after a long journey of progressive disaffection towards schooling produced by situations of exclusion and violence, continuous academic failures, low self-esteem and lack of motivation.

Keywords:

Early school leaving, education, migration, racism, narrative research.