There is a logic that sociologist Loïc Wacquant has been documenting for decades in Western societies: when the State reduces its capacity for social protection, it is not a conspiracy, but rather an inertia of penalizing poverty. Faced with the visible disorder that it produces, the quickest and easiest response to communicate is always that of order. The slowest, most expensive and difficult to articulate response is the one that attacks the causes and not just the symptoms.
. Given the increase in incidents in schools – aggressions between students, attacks on teachers – the Department of Education and the Mossos d’Esquadra: plainclothes agents, without weapons, with a stable presence in the centers, working with the management teams in prevention and mediation tasks.
The EDUSEG plan – revealing acronym – starts in 13 institutes considered especially problematic. The Government argues that it is a response to a demand from the teachers themselves, and that it is not intended to criminalize the students.
Both things can be true. And, even so, the measure alone constitutes in my opinion a major error. Conflict in high schools is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the concentrated and visible reflection of: new forms of poverty, families in situations of high job and housing precariousness, adolescents who do not perceive any reasonable horizon that justifies academic effort.
Teacher concern and discomfort are also a fact, which, of course, require solutions. But none of this justifies the administration interpreting this demand solely in terms of security, when a good part of what teachers and the educational community are asking for is more socio-educational support, more resources and better conditions in which to do their work.
This is where a variable that usually eludes public debate comes into play: the question of teachers. Not as a homogeneous group to blame or defend en bloc, but as a central factor of any serious educational policy. The institutes that concentrate the greatest conflict are also those that have the most difficulties in retaining the most experienced teachers, those that present higher replacement rates, and those that offer less stability to their faculty. Working in these environments requires specific training, continuous support and, also, real incentives. As long as this is not resolved, any other intervention will have a very low ceiling.
There is a reference that is worth remembering. In 2003, Tony Blair’s Labor government launched the London Challenge, a specific program to transform London’s secondary schools, which at that time were among the worst in the country and where, of course, conflict situations also occurred.
The program invested 80 million pounds in eight years and did not focus on security, but on three axes: improving school leadership, raising the quality of teaching and using data to identify and support the most lagging schools. Experienced teachers (some already retired) were assigned to the institutes with the worst results, collaboration networks were created between schools, and work was done specifically to attract and retain good teachers in the most difficult neighborhoods. The result was that the local authorities of the inner London went from being the worst in the country to the best. In the centers considered priority, the improvement in academic results was notably higher than the national average.
It is not about simply copying a model from another city and another time. But he London Challenge demonstrates that there is an alternative to being late and putting out fires: investing sustainably in the conditions that make it possible for a school to function well. This includes specific training of teachers to serve vulnerable students, incentives for the best teachers to want to work in the most demanding environments, the capacity of the centers to select and retain them, the reinforcement of the guidance and mental health teams, and the real connection with the territory’s social services. In short, strategic professional figures and an action plan.
None of this necessarily excludes the presence of mediating agents in the centers. But a Mossos agent, no matter how much he dresses in civilian clothes and has a preventive vocation, cannot replace a child psychologist, a social worker or a tutor with the time and training to accompany a student in difficulty.
If the measure is not accompanied by a more ambitious plan on the material and emotional conditions that allow a teenager to learn and live together, the police presence will be a temporary relief at best. Teachers and other professionals who work in the most difficult institutes in Catalonia have been asking for solutions for years. Adolescents themselves, conflictive or not, deserve answers that are commensurate with the problem. And putting police where educational and social professionals are needed does not seem to be.
