A 2nd year ESO student attempted suicide last year at a public high school in Madrid. Sitting in the back row of the classroom during English class, she tried to cut her wrists. The teacher, alarmed, ran to call the welfare coordinator to intervene, but she had an anxiety attack when she found out what had happened. She was completely blocked and didn’t know how to act. “She was an interim Physics teacher, who had just arrived at the institute. It was the first year she taught and she encountered this as soon as she arrived. Either you are very prepared or you don’t know how to react,” he says. Rocío Díaz Condenational head of Social Action of the union CSIF.
This case shows the school’s lack of resources to help its students. The new figure of the welfare and protection coordinator, created by the Government in schools and institutes to protect students from discomfort, harassment and abuse, is proving to be “a failure”, according to the educational community. A study published this Monday by the NGO Education complaint that the regulatory development of state legislation carried out by the regional governments is “irregular” and “insufficient” and that “the implementation is even worse.” Because?
“This figure was already born denatured” because “the Government did not regulate very well what it had to do,” he explains. Paula San Pedro, co-author of the report and Political Advocacy coordinator at Educo. She says that the Executive left everything at the mercy of the CCAA, which, in turn, passed responsibility to the educational centers. These are “the last link in the chain and have received all the burden.” “Schools have said they can’t do much because they don’t have resources,” she warns.
“The figure is poorly designed and has not been implemented adequately. It is impossible for it to be efficient. Nobody knows very well what it does and there are no references in educational centers. It will not have the capacity to respond to the phenomena that are taking place in the classrooms,” adds San Pedro.
Since 2019 there has been an increase of 40% in notifications of violence against children and adolescents. Spain is already the European country with the highest proportion of minors between 10 and 19 years of age who suffer from some mental health problem (the 21%in front of 16% of the European average).