A 83% of Catalans between 6 and 15 years old carry out some extracurricular activityr. Children and adolescents dedicate five hours a week on average to extracurricular activities during the course or, in other words: 190 hours of learning per year in sports, language, artistic, technological, leisure, school reinforcement or socio-educational support activities. Figures that, according to the report ‘The face and the tail of extracurricular participation: educational opportunities and inequalities’ They hide enormous inequality.
Extracurricular activities imply an average expense of 560 euros per year per child
A gap of 26 percentage points. While 92% of children and adolescents of high family socioeconomic status participate in extracurricular activities, only 66% of the low level do so.
Price is, needless to say, the main reason for non-participation in extracurricular activities (77% of cases) among families with a low socioeconomic level. They imply an average cost of 560 euros per year per child to cover extracurricular activities, to which summer activities must be added.
140,000 children excluded
In a class of 25 children, 4 do not do any extracurricular activities. In total, 140,000 children and adolescents between 6 and 15 years old will be excluded from this course.
Although economic barriers are the main ones, they are not the only ones.
Bureaucratic barriers
There are also cultural, geographical and bureaucratic barriers. “Financial and free aid policies must be rethought, expanded and reinforced with strategies of support, community work and proximity,” they point out from L’Aliança Educació 360, organization promoting the studywhich includes large town councils (Barcelona) and small town councils (Santa Maria d’Oló), provincial councils, regional councils and the most transversal institutions (from the Catalan Pedagogy Society to Minyons Escoltes i Guies de Catalunya).
From L’Aliança Educació 360 they claim “stronger and more stable policies to combat out-of-school inequality, “one of the weak points of education in Catalunya”, as the OECD educational advisor Anna Pons also pointed out a few days ago in an interview in this newspaper.
Inequalities player
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“Access to inequalities remains a reproductive sphere of inequalities, exclusions and existing educational and social segregations”, states the report presented this Tuesday, based on a survey carried out based on a sample of 1,203 fathers and mothers of children and adolescents of age compulsory schooling (between 6 and 15 years), representative in terms of variables of age, sex and grade of the children, territorial distribution and socioeconomic index according to the methodology of the General Mitjans Surveythat combines profession and level of education.
He Sport is the most practiced extracurricular activity in Catalonia, in 58% of cases, far above the rest of the activities. The second place is occupied by languages (33%). This is followed by artistic activities (25%) and school reinforcement (15%).