Schooling in Marbella reviewd by the SUR in English
Schools in Marbella have twice as many foreign pupils than the provincial average. Almost twenty schools have special classes for Spanish language lessons, and these are attended by 3,600 foreign pupils. One out of every ten is from Ecuador.
German, British, French, Chinese and even Australian. The presence of foreign pupils in schools, children of immigrants who have settled in the province, is a phenomenon which, instead of decreasing each year, keeps on growing. Teachers and school directors find themselves obliged to use their ingenuity and find ways of handling the mixture of languages in the classrooms. The objective: to avoid the children who do not speak Spanish becoming isolated and help them to absorb the language so they learn to speak it as well as their Spanish classmates.
This system, with its classrooms where different languages and cultures which are no less different are mixed together, is particularly evident in the state schools in Marbella. The statistics from the Junta de Andalucía are clear. Whereas the provincial average of foreign pupils in schools is almost 9 per cent, in Marbella the figure is 22.8 per cent. This means that, of the 15,750 schoolchildren in the town, some 3,600 are of other nationalities. The majority are Latin Americans; in fact, one out of every ten foreign pupils is from Ecuador, although there are also large numbers of Moroccans, Argentineans, British and Germans.
Surprisingly, this mixture of languages in state schools in Marbella is a relatively recent phenomenon. Even though this is a cosmopolitan town with a high percentage of foreign residents, traditionally the children of the wealthiest parents attended private schools such as the British, Swedish and German schools which have set up in the municipality.
“We have to set the record straight about Marbella, because British or Swedish children from middle and upper class families go to private schools”, says Manuel Mellado, who is the director of the Centro del Profesorado (CEP) of Marbella-Coín. On the contrary, foreign children in state schools have a very different profile: “they tend to be more problematical because they are nomads, from unstructured families, and they tend to arrive part way through the term”, he comments.
Adaptation
To cope with this massive influx of foreign pupils, 17 schools in Marbella have the so-called Temporary Classes for Linguistic Adaptation (ATAL), set up by the Junta de Andalucía, which are run by about ten teachers who work exclusively in teaching Spanish to foreign children. “They learn Spanish during the school day”, says Joaquín Perea, who is in charge of the Inter-culturality department of the provincial Education authorities. In this way, the youngsters progress through spending several hours a week in learning Spanish during reading periods, in groups according to their age and their knowledge of the language. In schools where there is enough demand, this is backed up with workshops for language support which are held as an extra-curricular activity, to provide an even greater opportunity for learning.
Despite these resources being provided by the Junta, teaching staff are calling for extra measures to deal with the presence of foreign children in their classrooms. “In comparison with other countries, where the influx of foreign pupils has been slower, there has been an avalanche of such children here and the impact of this has left teachers disconcerted”, says Mellado, who describes the linguistic support as “insufficient” and says it is hardly applicable to the material they teach, in which western culture is almost one hundred percent dominant.
“They are investing money but not where it is most needed”, comments the director of the CEP, who is also involved in organising courses and workshops to train teachers to deal with this new mixture of culture in schools. The aim is clear: “We are trying to change teachers’ attitudes so they aren’t afraid of the situation because otherwise it becomes a real challenge and, indeed, it is for many. Not for others, though, others see it as something very enriching”, adds Mellado.
And enriching not only for the teachers but also for the pupils. If learning the Spanish language is important, it is also important for foreign children to understand the culture and religion of the country and, on the other hand, for Spanish pupils to learn about the different lifestyles of their foreign classmates. “There are workshops to support and maintain their grasp of their native languages so they don’t become illiterate in their own language, because otherwise they stop reading and writing in it”, says Perea, referring to the seven schools in Marbella which have extra-curricular classes to improve knowledge of German, Moroccan and English.
Plans to accommodate foreigners who arrive here for the first time and inter-cultural activities which include parents complete the resources used to help integration and avoid situations of rejection or xenophobia, which are more likely in some places than others. “In Marbella they are more accustomed to living together and the attitudes and aptitudes are different, for example, from a village where the phenomenon is more recent”, concludes the head of the Inter-culturality department of the provincial education authority.
