The Pitiusas are where the least number of students pass the final year of Secondary School and go on to repeat this fourth year instead of moving on to Bachillerato. This is stated in the article ‘El sistema educatiu en les Illes Balears’, published in the latest edition of the ‘Anuari de l’Educació’, edited by the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB) and the Fundació Guillem Cifre de Colonya.
The text, signed by Antoni Bauzà Sampol, Belén Pascual Barrio, Joan Amer Fernàndez and Marga Vives Barceló, details that this situation has been maintained in the last two academic years, although the figures are quite different. In 2019-2020, 7.9% of the students of the Pitiusas repeated the last year of Secondary Education, a figure more than half a point above the average of the total of the Balearic Islands and 7.4% that Mallorca registered. Also above the state average, which stood at 7.5% that year.
These percentages are quite far from that of Menorca, where only 5.3% of students repeated. In fact, during the four years of this educational stage there is quite a distance between the percentage of those repeating on Ibiza, Formentera and Mallorca and that of Menorca. Third year of Secondary School is the course that students of all the islands, including the Pitiusas, repeated the most in 2019-2020: 9.5%.
The figures changed considerably in the last academic year, 2020-2021, when the percentage of students who repeated any of the four courses was reduced by half. This is something that, as is the case with students who advance to the next year, is due, according to the authors of the article, to the pandemic: “We must bear in mind that the suspension of face-to-face educational activity during the 2019-2020 academic year, maintaining classes with distance and online modalities, was an exceptional situation that entailed taking specific measures for assessment and making graduation and qualification decisions more flexible at the end of the course”. Last year, however, the third year of secondary school had the fewest students to repeat in Ibiza and Formentera’s schools, just 3.2%. Last year, the fourth year had the highest percentage of students who had to redo this level: 4.1%.
Seconday School- Boys repeat more
In the Comunitat as a whole, the article in the ‘Anuari de l’Educació’ highlights that boys repeat much more than girls at all levels of Secondary Education. Also, there are more repetitions in public schools than in state-subsidised schools. And in both, many more than in private schools, where last year, on the islands as a whole, not a single pupil repeated in the third and fourth years of secondary school, and barely 0.1% in the first two years of this stage.
The authors of the analysis, of more than thirty pages long, emphasize that Menorca “is the island with the highest percentage of repetitions in primary school”, with the exception of the third and sixth year, which serves as promotion for secondary school, an educational stage in which it is the island with the lowest percentage of students who need to restart the same level.
Last year, Ibiza and Formentera were the islands with the lowest number of students who did not pass the same level in the first, second and fifth years of primary school, with less than 1% of students who had to repeat. In third grade, on the other hand, 1.3% of students did not pass, the highest percentage on the Balearic Islands.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.