A little more than two out of every ten students in the classrooms of the Pitiusas, 21.8%, are foreigners. This figure is not only by far the highest on the Balearic Islands (in Mallorca it is 15.4% and in Menorca, 8.3%), but it is also more than double the figure of foreign students for the whole of Spain: 9.9% of the total number of pupils enrolled from Infants to Bachillerato, as well as Vocational Training. This is what the article ‘El sistema educatiu a les Illes Balears’, published in the latest edition of the Anuari de l’Educació, edited by the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) and the Fundació Guillem Cifre de Colonya, states, with data from the last academic year.
In the case of Ibiza and Formentera, Basic Vocational Training is the educational stage in which students of other nationalities have the greatest weight, 28.8%, followed by Primary Education, where they account for one out of every four students. This is also the case in the Balearic Islands as a whole, although with much lower figures (20.6% and 18.9%). In the country as a whole, Basic Vocational Training also has the highest percentage of foreign students, but very far from the figure for the Balearic Islands: 15.4%. In second place, on the other hand, is Special Education, with 13.5%, according to the study signed by Antoni Bauzà, Belén Pascual, Joan Amer and Marga Vives.
In the classrooms of the Pitiusas there were last year foreign students from a total of 89 countries, including Spain. In the case of Ibiza, the number of students of ordinary studies who, last year, had other nationalities was almost 5,000: a total of 4,767 from 86 countries. In Formentera, 360 of 28 nationalities, details another article in the same publication: ‘Un dels efectes de la covid-19: l’aturada en l’increment de la matrícula escolar de l’alumnat estranger’, by Luis Vidaña. In the total of the Balearic Islands, schoolchildren from outside Spain correspond to 143 countries, the text points out.
On the island of Ibiza, however, there are students from four parts of the world that are not present in the classrooms of any other island: Cambodia, the British Virgin Islands, Mozambique and Rwanda, as can be seen in the list that Vidaña includes at the end of the document. This is also the case on Formentera, which is the only island in the Comunitat that welcomes schoolchildren from Madagascar and Jordan.
In the Balearic Islands as a whole, the ten foreign nationalities most present in the classrooms are, in this order, Morocco, Italy, Colombia, Romania, Argentina, Germany, United Kingdom, China, Bulgaria and Ecuador. The Pitiusas only coincide in the first of these countries, Morocco. Students from this country account for one in four foreign students in the case of Ibiza and even more, one in three, on Formentera. On Formentera, the second most numerous nationality is Italy, followed by Romania, Colombia and Brazil. On Ibiza, the nine countries with the highest number of students are, after Morocco: Romania, Italy, United Kingdom, Ecuador, Colombia, Paraguay, Germany, France and the Philippines.
Vidaña explains in the article that last year there was a small reduction in the number of foreign students on the islands. In total number, Ibiza has lost the largest number of these students (282), followed by Menorca (133) and Formentera (7), while in Mallorca the figure increased by 82. However, as a percentage of the total number of students, the Pitiusas remained the same, just a tenth (0.1%) less in Ibiza and more in Formentera.
One of the aspects detailed in the text is a change that has occurred, with the pandemic, in the distribution of these students: it has clearly decreased in public centers while it has increased in private and subsidized centers.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.