How can equity and quality be reconciled in education?

Nowadays, reducing failure at school has become one of the main priorities for our education system. However, in our immediate context, problems of academic performance can still be identified among our young people, too often in the environments that are least favoured from a socioeconomic and cultural point of view.

However, investment in educational formulas attempting to inclusively cover the situations of greatest disadvantage is not only fairer, it also turns out to be economically more efficient. The return becomes clear immediately when you consider the unacceptable cost of leaving school early, which notably reduces people’s chances of lifelong learning and enormously limits their capacity to react to situations like the economic crisis we are currently suffering.

So, the efficiency of the structure and operational dynamic of education systems can no longer be measured without taking into account their capacity to alleviate initial inequalities and eliminate the barriers that could prevent the majority of students, and also those in the most vulnerable situations, from being able to progress to the end of secondary education and have open access to specialisation options in higher education.

The most advanced education systems – the ones that, in fact obtain higher shares of academic performance – have already understood that these results only provide the maximum benefit for society if they are obtained through formulas making it possible to maintain the balance between quality and fairness. With this conviction, they try to promote the type of strategy that can ensure that all youngsters, not just a few, will be able to stay in the education system and acquire the competences that will be essential for developing as active, participative citizens in 21st-century society under conditions of equality of opportunity.