The world and the global economic environment continue to change, as seven billion humans become eight billion humans, which is a lot of mouths to feed, a lot of economic opportunities for global businessmen to exploit, and a lot of competition for jobs. Spanish youth unemployment is back at the top of the global rankings once more, at 53.8%, having won the top spot back from Greece again in July.
The way a nation educates its children to adapt to that changing world is the key to their, and the nation’s, future success. A country has a duty to do everything it can to prepare them in the best way possible to be well-educated individuals, capable of participating in a nation’s moral, social and political life, and of creating and offering real economic value to markets.
Spain’s new king, Felipe VI, recognised that situation today on a visit to a primary school in the company of José Ignacio Wert, the Spanish Education Minister: “We need an education that, invariably, trains Spaniards to be open to the world”.
Unfortunately, global education rankings do not stop putting Spanish education in the “must try much harder” category, and the King of Spain is aware of that fact too: “our education system still has very grave problems”, said His Majesty, adding that the quality of Spanish education must be improved “urgently” so that: “the training offer corresponds to the real needs of the economy”.
Which is to say, it does not currently do so, nor has it done so for very many years.
In a comment that is directly related to Mr. Rajoy’s employment reforms, the OECD in its latest global education report says so many young Spaniards neither studying nor working is because of the: “high incidence of young people moving from one short-term, temporary contract to another, frequently interspersed with periods of unemployment”.
Spanish children leave school earlier, are much worse at reading and find it much harder to relate their schooling to finding a job once they do leave, even though Spanish teachers are better paid and work fewer hours than their global counterparts.
Despite the gaping, urgent hole separating education, the economy and employment in Spain, however, the number of young Spaniards deciding to take some form of professional training course between the ages of 16-18 is just 9%, more than three times lower than neighbouring European countries like Germany, France and Italy.
It’s not that Spaniards are not capable of excelling at education if they try. Spain’s IESE business school has consistently scored in the Top 10 for global full-time MBA courses over the past few years, but most Spanish children are stuck with the results of the OECD’s PISA reports, which award them below average marks for maths, science, reading and creative problem solving.
The latest set of QS rankings published by The Guardian today show just three Spanish universities in the top 200 in the world, with the University of Barcelona leading at 166. This is very similar to Spain’s results in the Shanghai ranking, where the University of Barcelona comes in the top 200 and there are three more Spanish universities in the top 300.
The Education Ministry itself admitted in its version of the new OECD figures that few young Spaniards reach the highest performance levels and that reading proficiency here is “notorious”, adding that: “its relative position is very bad” compared to other nations, even amongst graduates.
Given the partisan nature of the education debate in Spain, and the fragmented regional responsibilities for schools, it is very difficult to see exactly in which ways the country might change for the sake of its children.
Such complexity and confusion, however, mean big, difficult future national goals and some creative destruction are in order, so that national thought on the matter may be clarified.
Mr. Rajoy could appoint the Dean of the IESE Business School as Education Minister, and send out teams of experts to urgently learn from those countries—there are many to choose from—who are consistently far ahead of Spain in all of the global rankings. Whilst the long process of national institutional learning and education improvement takes place, Spain could just copy and paste the best ideas from all of those countries.
What would Spain need to do in order to get one of its universities in the Top 10 in the world? How could Spanish education change so that the number of 16-year olds leaving school fell from 45% to below 10%? Which national behaviours would need to change in order to turn the tiny 9% of Spanish 16 year-olds entering professional training into 100%, all able to offer economic value to the world?