The Confederation of Employers of Andalusia today welcomed the presentation of the Study on the State of Education in Spain and also in Andalusia, and that is specified in the role that parents, mothers and guardians exercise over their children between four and eighteen years. The study has been conducted by the journalistic research forum Educa2020 in collaboration with the AXA Foundation Y Sigmados, in addition to the Andalusian Ministry of Education and CEA, and is the most ambitious demonstration in its field ever carried out in our country and in this Community by private entities.
The event was attended by the President of the Educa2020 Program, Fernando Jáuregui; the General Director of the AXA Foundation, Josef Alfonso; The Territorial Delegate of the Ministry of Education and Sports, Joaquín Pérez Blanes, the President of CEA, Javier González de Lara, who remembered "The need to reach an Educational Pact in Spain and, among other issues, to promote Dual Vocational Training, which is one of the great educational and future alternatives for our young people and for companies".
According to this study, Vocational Training is still the 'ugly duckling' of education, at least in the concept of the parents of the students. The situation is especially noticeable in Andalusia, where the 'bad image' of the FP is three points above the national average (60'6 against 57'5 percent). Seventy-five percent of Andalusian parents of children between the ages of four and eighteen acknowledge that they have not talked with their child's guidance counselors about the possibility that their child might study a career related to PF. The national average in this respect is 73 percent.
Respondents to the survey are, in a much higher percentage, mothers, aged between 42 and 62 years and with higher education. In Andalusia highlights the data that is, after Madrid, the Community with the highest percentage of parents with three children. In addition, it appears in the front of the table of the Communities with three or more children, which, in principle, indicates that the birth rate in Andalusia is among the highest in Spain.
Andalusian parents, like most of the rest of the Communities, are inclined towards the Bachelor of Science for their children (46 percent compared to the national average close to 40 percent), to the detriment of the technological, humanistic and science baccalaureates social. However, slightly more than half of the parents admit not advising their children about their studies, although half of the respondents in this community say they have had a conversation with their children about STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).
The survey affects the assessment of parents about Vocational Training, that slightly more than half of respondents think that it still has a bad image. However, studies previously carried out by Educa2020 and the AXA Foundation show that the labor supply of companies is mainly directed towards FP. In Andalusia, the students of average FP are in the first places administrative management and network technicians.
In this line, Josep Alfonso, director of the AXA Foundation, emphasizes that "the adequacy of training to the economic needs of a country is key to growth, hence the need to revalue and promote Vocational Training in Spain."
This macro survey is the fourth conducted by the Forum of journalistic research on educational subjects Educa2020 and the AXA Foundation, this time with the advice and technical certification of Sigmados. The first survey was conducted in 2016, among nine thousand university students; the second in 2017, between twelve thousand eight hundred students of Bachillerato and FP; and the third in 2018 tried to find out why companies (2,500 samples) do not find suitable candidates for their job offers.
With this fourth survey, conducted in Andalusia with the help of the Ministry of Education to parents, mothers and guardians of students from primary to the end of the Bachillerato, the cycle of studies that Educa2020 takes seven years is completed. Soon, this Forum, under the auspices of the Axa Foundation, will publish a comparative study of the four works, which have been developed for almost five years and which, in total, have gathered the opinion of forty-three thousand people in all the Communities. Autonomous Spaniards among university students, students of Bachillerato and Vocational Training, companies and parents.