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The Alliance for Inclusive Education and against School Segregation organized an online conference with experts and politicians under the title "Towards an inclusive school: ending school segregation is possible" [editar]

The alliance for Inclusive Education and against School Segregation (Fundación Secretariado Gitano, CERMI and Save the Children) passed their proposals to the different political groups to end school segregation in Spain and move towards a truly inclusive education.

08/07/2020
Fundación Secretariado Gitano, Save the Children y CERMI

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The Alliance for Inclusive Education and against School Segregation organized an online conference with experts and politicians under the title This online meeting is part of the activities of the European project "No Segregation", funded by the European Commission, DG Justice. The project is lead by the Bulgarian organization Amalipe and Fundación Secretariado Gitano and European Roma Information Office (Belgium) as partners. The objective is to know the situation of school segregation of Roma students in these three participating countries, as well as the Roma students coming from Eastern European countries.

On July 6th, 2020, the Alliance for Inclusive Education and against School Segregation, organized an online parliamentary conference with deputies and senators under the title “Towards an inclusive school: ending school segregation is possible”, good practices and successful examples were shown on how to combat school segregation, a problem that today causes many boys and girls not to have equal opportunities due to ethnicity, origin, socioeconomic situation or disability in Spain. This online meeting took place after the recent publication of the UNESCO 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report, this year dedicated to school inclusion, and taking advantage of the parliamentary debate on the reform of the new education law.

In addition, this meeting is part of the activities of the European project "No Segregation", funded by the European Commission, DG Justice. The project, lead by the Bulgarian organization Amalipe has Fundación Secretariado Gitano and European Roma Information Office (Belgium) as partners. The objective is to know the actual situation of school segregation of Roma students in these three participating countries, as well as the Roma students coming from Eastern European countries. In addition, good practices in desegregation are collected to propose models of desegregation that could be put in place. 

During the conference, the Alliance transferred to the political groups the three key measures to reverse this situation: a reform of the educational law that recognizes the right to inclusive education and includes concrete measures of admission, control and resources against school segregation; a state plan for educational inclusion and against school segregation with a calendar, objectives, indicators and budget agreed with the Autonomous regions to eliminate segregation before 2030; and a new comprehensive Law on equal treatment and fight against discrimination that recognizes, prohibits and sanctions segregation.

During the event, which was attended by Manos Antoninis, director of the UNESCO Monitoring Report on Education in the World, and Koumbou Boly Barry, UN special rapporteur for the Right to Education, cases were presented of good practices in Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Eastern Europe. Antoninis, highlighted educational inclusion as a process of improvement that requires the political will to move forward, cooperating between all actors and governments, and urged Spain to do so. He emphasized that "the main obstacle to inclusive education is the lack of belief that it is possible and desirable."

Fernando Rey, professor of Constitutional Law and former Minister of Education of Castilla y León, a pioneer in the implementation of measures to combat school segregation of students in situations of socio-educational vulnerability, defended the need to introduce corrective measures in the system to stop the segregation of Roma students, "because it is an uncomfortable reality, socially and politically invisible, tolerated, but intolerable as unconstitutional."

The director of the Colegio Cardenal Spínola in Madrid gave testimony of how this school has adapted to accommodate all kinds of students. “We say that there are no students with special educational needs, but that there are schools with barriers. It has to be the center that adapts to the student and not the other way around ”. In addition, he explained the details that the center made in favor of educative inclusion and defended that “inclusion is not a right only for students with special educational needs, but for all children, since we cannot deprive any of them of living and know the diversity ”.

The manager of the Consorci d'Educació de Barcelona, ​​Mercè Massa, showed how through the early detection of socially disadvantaged students with Social Services and corrective measures of admission, such as reservation of places by center and balanced distributions of living enrollment, It has reduced school segregation in city schools and its social composition is similar to that of the neighborhoods where they are.

Immediately afterwards, another table of good practices was held at the European level, in which Marko Pecak, representative of the association Roma Education Fund of Hungary, denounced the bias that continues to exist in the system against the Roma population: “Any desegregation legislation or efforts must address the root causes of segregation which are based on structural and systemic anti-Roma racism.” Likewise, he condemned that in recent years segregation has increased, so he appealed to "change the attitudes of the majority society" and to strengthen the legislation of different countries to guarantee inclusion.

Also in the chapter of good practices, the Secretary of State for the Inclusion of People with Disabilities of the Portuguese Government, Ana Sofía Antunes, intervened, who shared the great advances that the Portuguese country has made in terms of inclusion in the last decade, with actions aimed at to all students and others specifically aimed at those with special needs, such as curricular adaptations, tutorial support with a second teacher in class, etc. As for students with major disabilities who need more intense support, we work with multidisciplinary teams. "In Portugal, 97% of students with disabilities are enrolled in ordinary schools," said Antunes, who proclaimed that "our intention is more and better inclusion."

In addition, Jean Pierre Verhaeghe, adviser to the Flanders Commissioner for Children's Rights and president of the Ghent Schooling Commission (Belgium), who explained the keys to the successful Flemish schooling legislation, which the OECD has been putting as a benchmark and that establishes minimums and maximums of students of high and low socioeconomic level per school. The idea is that "the centers are representative of the whole of society" respecting the possibility of choosing among families.

The closing was carried out by the UN special rapporteur for the Right to Education, Koumbou Boly Barry, who called to think "what society do we want to build" and warned that "an approach based on human rights is not being used" , for which "a change of mentality is needed, with specific measures for specific needs". In his opinion, decisions and knowledge should be centralized, in order to know which points of the recommendations are fulfilled by the different States: “The right to education is linked to the right to food, water, a decent life… There is a interconnection between rights, so families, teachers and students must be given a voice to say what they need ”. "In Spain they are concerned about inclusive education and I want them to know that I am by their side, because this work is basic for society and is very beautiful," said the UN rapporteur spoke.

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