The Spanish School

IES PABLO RUIZ PICASSO

I.E.S. Pablo Ruiz Picasso is a secondary school located in El Ejido, a village on the south of Spain, in the province of Almería, Andalucía. Taking into consideration the peculiarities of this secondary school such as the large influx of immigrant families, the identity and personal style of the IES Pablo Ruiz Picasso are based on building a model of coexistence to develop interpersonal skills, through the promotion of positive attitudes, discipline, collaboration, fellowship, tolerance and respect for the person, their differences, cultures and customs.

Main immigrant students’ features are:

  • Lack of habits and interest in their studies.
  • High risk of dropout in the pupils of North African origin when they reach 15 years.

In order to palliate these shortcomings, several projects had to be carried out: ‘Educational Compensation’ and ‘Intercultural Project’ implementing measures to compensate the gap of knowledge the socio-educational disadvantaged students have. These two projects are complemented by: ‘Peaceful School Area Project’ and the ‘Co-Education project’, which foster an appropriate climate of coexistence and truancy prevention. In addition, as a way to promote the integration of immigrant students, and promote extracurricular coexistence, IES Pablo Ruiz Picasso hosts extracurricular programmes to be developed after the school hours: ‘Accompaniment program’ devoted to students with learning difficulties and ‘Spanish as a second language’ for immigrants who cannot speak Spanish.

The school is an ICT centre with all the necessary technological appliances required for the classroom, and for the area of English, there is also a language laboratory and interactive digital boards in every single classroom.

There are 600 registered students of a low social level in the centre, distributed in the following educational offer:

  • 16 groups of C.S.E (five groups in the two first courses, three in 3rd of C.S.E and in 4th of CSE).
  • 2 groups in Post- Compulsory Education (four in each course and two in each speciality: Science and Technology and Humanity and Social Sciences departments.)

The ratio of immigrants is significant due to importance of the agricultural industry of the area requiring a great amount of handwork. There are people coming especially from Morocco and Guinea Bissau. Therefore, the students form a quite heterogeneous group. The teaching staff is composed of 51 teachers, 5 of them belong to the English department, and one psychologist (Counsellor), what has been proved insufficient for such a big school. Most of the teachers (80%) have a permanent post in this school, what contributes to create a pretty safe and ordered working atmosphere and benefits team work and mutual collaboration. Therefore, the school atmosphere is appropriate and the students have, in general, correct disciplinary habits. The AMPA (Association of parents) actively contribute to the preparation of extracurricular activities.

«This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.»