Fundación Secretariado Gitano

The campaign “NOT back to school” breaks with advertising fiction and calls for a specific plan against school failure of Roma students [editar]

• Education
• National level

Indecent facts

School failure, multiple grade repetitions, lack of support for studies and without family rol models with higher education, in segregated schools and, most of them, in situations of poverty, is the reality that marks the educational development of a large number of Roma children. This situation means that 2 out of every 3 do not complete compulsory secondary education.

According to the general director of the Fundación Secretariado Gitano (FSG), Sara Giménez, “the lack of specific actions of an educational system that does not take into account many of the characteristics and situations of Roma students, means that decade after decade the same results of failure and school dropout are repeated and the gap with the rest of the population widens. The devastating consequence is to condemn Roma children to educational failure”.

“NOT back to school” is part of a new cycle of social awareness campaigns in the field of education, a priority issue for Fundación Secretariado Gitano. It denounces this unacceptable situation and calls on the public authorities for a specific plan to reverse the situation of educational failure and dropout suffered by Roma students. It also calls for measures to ensure the free incorporation of Roma children in the early stages of early infant education and reverse school segregation that affects 1 in 3 Roma children.

If September marks the media attention on the return to school, the campaign presented today by Fundación Secretariado Gitano breaks with this advertising fiction showing that, for many Roma children, the return to school is full of barriers, away from the clichés of the ads and shows the failure and abandonment in compulsory stages.

School dropout 73 points higher than average

 “NOT back to school” was presented at the Telefónica Foundation in Madrid, with a spot that begins superficially, like so many back-to-school ads. The typical back-to-school song with clichés is sung by Roma children who tell a very different educational reality. It is the protagonists themselves who denounce the situation and demand that “This has to change now!”.

The campaign, which has been produced by the advertising agency Sra. Rushmore, will be disseminated on social media and through the FSG’s events throughout Spain.

“Two out of every three Roma children do not finish compulsory secondary education. This is the terrible data that affects Roma youth and that nobody seems to care about. If these data referred to the majority population as a whole, the public authorities would be forceful in the implementation of decisive measures to tackle them. As a society we cannot allow this indecency,” said Sara Giménez, general director of the FSG during the presentation of the campaign.

Giménez also confirmed that “we know that with specific support and educational reinforcement programs, the bad data can be reversed. We have demonstrated this. For this reason, we ask, we demand, a specific Plan of guidance and educational reinforcement for the Roma students that fully guarantees their right to education”.

Data from the FSG's latest study The educational situation of Roma students in Spain reflect a stagnation in the last decade, with unbearable rates of school failure (64%), which means that they do not finish compulsory secondary education. Roma children enter the educational system late and their trajectory is marked by grade repetition: at the age of 11, 40% have already repeated grades.

The school dropout rate, which is clearly weighing down the future of thousands of Roma children, rises to 86%, when it is 13% for the population as a whole.

 

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