The comparative situation of Spain in the different ar­eas described in the previous section is clearly linked to the level of resources allocated to the education system and the type of design chosen for education policies. In the same way as education in any society can act as a means of reproducing or reducing back­ground-related inequalities, public decision makers’ ambition in terms of budgetary commitment in this area determines the ultimate impact of education on society, as well as the degree to which households’ ed­ucational needs are met.

Within this comparative context, the Spanish experi­ence is quite unique because it is one of the few Eu­ropean countries where public authorities fund private education in various ways. In most European coun­tries, the education system is usually organised in such a way as to make it a very generalised public-sector one, where access to private institutions is more lim­ited. In practice, after the United Kingdom and Bel­gium, Spain is the country with the highest number of students in publicly funded private-sector education. Given that several studies have shown the publicly funded private-sector educational estab­lishments take in a high proportion of students from families with a high socioeconomic level, this type of spending on publicly funded private-sector education is regressive in nature, i.e., it favours the wealthiest more than the poorest.

in Spain by the Social Observatory of ”la Caixa”, pre­sented below are indicators referring to the volume of resources invested and the intensity of protection of­fered, as are indicators for policies specifically aimed at meeting social needs.

One of the features that best defines the characteristics of the constraints faced by education policies in Spain is the allocation of a lower relative volume of resourc­es (4.2% of GDP) than the European country mean (more than 5%). Since 2009, such spending has gradu­ally fallen and Spain – alongside other Mediterranean countries – is currently characterised as a country that makes a lower budget allocation to the education sys­tem. That said, Spain’s relative spending is higher than that of Greece or Italy.

The progressive drop in the birth rate and the narrow­ing of the base of the Spanish population pyramid, which are not offset by migratory flows, mean that the indicators relating to volume of spending do not reflect its protective intensity well. A more direct indicator is per-student public spending. The calculation of such spending for the different EU countries confirms the previous portrayal because it puts Spain at a lower lev­el than EU mean (10% less than the European mean).

That lower relative intensity of spending as a whole does not manifest itself in the same way in the differ­ent educational levels. It is slightly above the EU mean in primary education and upper secondary education, and around the mean in lower secondary education. At the first two levels mentioned, Spain is situated right at the mean of the 27 countries for which there are data. Of note in a negative sense is the gap that still exists in per-university-student resource investment (14% below the EU mean). At this educational level, Spain spends less than all the countries that have a higher mean income, with the exception of Italy, and the effort is also lower than that of some lower income countries. The figure is nearly a quarter lower than the EU mean and, what is more, the trend has been a downward one since the beginning of the decade.

A commonly used indicator of the relative intensity of spending on education that complements the previous one is per-student spending expressed as a proportion of GDP per capita. This indicator offers a measure of the intensity of effort that a society makes on educa­tion in relation to its level of economic development, and it allows the effects of wealth and population dif­ferences to be reduced in comparisons between coun­tries. The calculation of this indicator for EU countries using available information gives a worse result than the previous ones. Spain is situated in the last quartile, further below the European mean than in the previous indicators. A relevant piece of information is that there does not appear to be a clear statistical relationship between the countries’ income level and that relative effort, although it is generally below the mean in less wealthy countries.

Two relevant indicators for measuring the achieve­ment of the first challenge – having access to quality education – were the percentage of students who ac­cessed the different educational levels and the inci­dence of the school leaving problem. In all the coun­tries, a factor for improving both indicators is the extension of the scholarships and grants system. A policy of scholarships and grants that is sufficiently generous and properly focused on households with the biggest problems in accessing the education system reduces the cost of access to the different stages of the education system and increases the opportunity costs of leaving it. That is why scholarships and grants have normally been considered instruments that are crucial to equal opportunities.

As noted by various authors, scholarships and grants, and the costs corresponding to these items that are published annually by the Spanish Ministry of Edu­cation, refer to different items that require a certain conceptual differentiation (Tiana, 2015). At the stages when access to public-sector and publicly funded pri­vate-sector educational establishments is free (second stage of early childhood education, primary education and compulsory secondary education), there are no enrolment costs and scholarships and grants help to wholly or partially offset households’ education-relat­ed spending (materials, meals, etc.). At the following stages (baccalaureate and intermediate vocational education and training), enrolment is only free at pub­lic-sector educational establishments. A significant proportion of scholarships and grants is therefore al­located to university education or equivalent studies, where the fees students pay only cover a small part of the real cost of their studies.

The available data on the evolution of the number of students who are beneficiaries of general study schol­arships and grants for the last two decades show a suc­cession of three clearly distinct stages. In the period before the financial crisis, the number of beneficiaries remained relatively stable, albeit with a slight down­ward trend. From the middle of the last decade, the number of scholarships and grants began to grow con­siderably, at a very pronounced rate of increase.

That growth came to a drastic halt in the 2011/12 aca­demic year. Moreover, in 2013, Spanish Royal Decree 609/2013 made the requirements for obtaining a schol­arship or grant tougher. At the same time, there was a significant increase in university fees in most Autono­mous Communities. The simultaneity of the two pro­cesses within a context of drastically increased house­hold needs put a major brake on the contribution of public policies in Spain to university education access. Although the number of scholarships and grants grew, that increase was insufficient to cope with the growing demand resulting from households’ drop in income. There are two further factors that make it necessary to think about the suitability of the scholarships and grants system. Firstly, since the above-mentioned re­form, the mean amounts awarded have gone down in real terms. Secondly, as various studies have shown, a large part of the spending does not go to those house­holds most in need, thus limiting its potential contribu­tion to equal opportunities. On top of that, the spend­ing allocated to higher education is, in the majority of instances, awarded to households that fall within the highest income deciles (Calero, 2015).

The set of actions promoting access to education can be considered an investment in future economic growth and a commitment to improving equal oppor­tunities. Besides the usual arguments of social equality and justice, investment in education from very young ages can also be considered a means of boosting the capitalisation of human resources, with positive ef­fects on economic growth in the long term. From the perspective of individual opportunities, early child­hood education promotes the development of cogni­tive and non-cognitive skills that may be important for lifelong individual development.

As emphasised by the OECD in various reports (Start­ing Strong), early childhood education programmes can improve the above-mentioned skills, help to lay the foundations for continued learning, make the re­sults of learning more equitable, reduce poverty and improve intergenerational mobility. In most countries, governments have used different formulas to gradual­ly increase the resources allocated to early childhood education. However, universal access to such pro­grammes does not exist in every country, and the re­sources invested in them differ considerably.

Eurostat data once again enable it to be shown that Spain is situated below the EU country mean and far from those countries that invest the most public re­sources in this type of education, such as the Nordic countries. In those countries, there is a much stronger tradition of systems that integrate early childhood ed­ucation and care. However, the data show that per-stu­dent spending in Spain is situated below that of all the other higher income countries apart from the United Kingdom, which means that clear and consistent strat­egies have to be devised for the efficient allocation of public resources to this priority area.