Fundación Secretariado Gitano

FSG's Secondary School Graduate Classrooms close the school year with 83% of students obtaining the Compulsory Education diploma [editar]

• Employment
• National level

Fundación Secretariado Gitano has organised 42 Secondary School Graduate Classrooms during the 21/22 school year, which have enabled 405 young Roma to enrol in one of the courses to obtain the compulsory education.

These classrooms are part of our training and employment programme, Acceder, which is now in its 22nd year. According to the impact assessment recently conducted, 78% of the Roma students who have participated over these 22 years, did not have the minimum compulsory education at the time of joining Acceder. This figure is particularly representative of the barriers and difficulties faced by the Roma community, if we also take into account that most of the participants were young: 69% were aged between 16 and 29.

Students from 42 different cities have enrolled in the training offered by Radio ECCA to obtain the diploma of Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO). Since 2016, Fundación Secretariado Gitano (FSG) and Fundación Radio ECCA have been working together so that Roma people who participate in personalised inclusion pathways in Acceder can obtain the ESO diploma, an essential requirement to access the job market.

The classrooms use ECCA's modular and cumulative methodology together with the mentoring and support of the students provided by professionals from FSG. This methodology is giving good results: 83% of those enrolled in the last stage (equivalent to 4th year of the secondary education) have obtained the ESO diploma this year.

Particularly relevant is the participation of Roma women in the Graduate Classrooms. In the “Comparative Study on the situation of the Roma population in Spain in relation to employment and poverty”, women show a worse situation in all the training and employment indicators: only 15% of Roma women complete the secondary education and only 16% are employed.

This year's results show how effective the Graduate Classrooms have been in facilitating Roma women's access to employment:

• 66% of the 405 people enrolled have been women.
• 62% of the 115 people enrolled in the last stage of the course were women.
• 63% of the 95 graduates were women.

The Graduate Classrooms are financed by the European Social Fund through the Operational Programme for Youth Employment and the Operational Programme for Inclusion and Social Economy. This program is also co-funded by La Caixa Foundation.