The analysis of education-related social needs by means of a system of basic indicators poses three dif­ferent challenges: firstly, access to the education sys­tem; secondly, whether those who access education do so with the possibility of attaining adequate com­petencies to contribute to a developed society; and thirdly, whether the education system they access promotes equal life opportunities for people from dif­ferent social backgrounds and, by investing in human capital, therefore effectively promotes social and eco­nomic development in the long term.

The information collected by means of the proposed indicators sheds light on the strengths and weakness­es of the Spanish education system. All the access in­dicators have significantly improved in the last two decades apart from the one measuring early school leaving, whereas the knowledge and competency in­dicators have slowly improved apart from the one measuring foreign language knowledge. Lastly, the in­dicators for the third challenge relating to equal edu­cational opportunities for people from different social backgrounds show a clear difference to the detriment of people from lower social backgrounds in terms of attaining competencies, the probability of repeating a school year, and the persistence of low educational levels generation after generation.

The population’s well-being is closely related to pos­sibilities of accessing education. The ease or difficulty in accessing schooling is usually assessed by means of net schooling rates, i.e., people of that age who are en­rolled in any of the school years within the education system. Presented in the indicators for the first chal­lenge are the schooling rates for different age ranges prior to compulsory education: children younger than 3 years old and those aged 3 to 6. As can be seen, Spain has high early childhood education rates: 98% of chil­dren aged 3 or over are schooled, whereas the mean rate for OECD countries is situated at 76% (OECD, 2018a). In general, Spain also displays a high level of interregional equality in relation to this aspect, as prac­tically no variation between the regions was recorded for the enrolment rates of 3-year-olds (OECD, 2018a). In addition, more and more parents have schooled their under 3-year-old children in the last decade. Cur­rently, 1 in 3 children of that age are schooled.

However, simply having access to schooling does not guarantee that people will attain a certain educational level. That is why it is necessary to use other indicators that can provide information about the educational lev­el attained: sufficient (compulsory education), medi­um (baccalaureate [a post-16 educational qualification in Spain], vocational education and training or similar studies) and high (university or equivalent studies). The indicators show that, in the last two decades, there has been a marked improvement in the Spanish pop­ulation’s medium educational level. More specifically, in 2004, 1 in 3 people aged 25 to 64 had not attained a sufficient educational level to enable them to develop a minimum of skills and to acquire basic competencies. In other words, they had managed, at the very most, to complete primary education but had not completed lower secondary education. Fortunately, that percent­age has fallen drastically, and now only 1 in 10 people do not attain a sufficient educational level.

Regarding the educational levels beyond compulsory education, the trend is also positive, albeit to a less­er extent, in both intermediate and higher studies. Whereas, in 2004, more than half of the population aged 25 to 64 had not managed to attain intermedi­ate studies (baccalaureate, vocational education and training or similar studies), that level is now attained by 60% of the population within that age range and by 70% of the population if we focus solely on younger people aged 25 to 29. In 2000, 4 in 10 people aged 25 to

64 had not completed compulsory education (prima­ry and lower secondary education), whereas, in 2018, only 1 in 10 people did not manage to do so. The num­ber of people who do not attain a medium educational level (baccalaureate or any branch of vocational edu­cation and training) has also fallen. It went from 6 in 10 people in 2000 to 4 in 10 in 2018. Among those who do not attain a high educational level, 21% finished the baccalaureate and 15% finished the intermediate level of vocational education and training, whereas, at the beginning of the century, only 13% and 7% managed to do so, respectively.

The results are similar in the high educational level. Whereas, in 2004, nearly 3 in 4 people aged 25 to 64 had not attained a high educational level, now the fig­ures for this group are slightly lower (10 percentage points lower, falling from 73% to 63% of people in this age range). If we focus on younger people, almost 1 in 2 people aged 25 to 29 managed to attain a high educa­tional level.

As a negative indicator, and despite the improvements in schooling rates and the educational levels that the population attains, the percentage of people who leave school early in Spain is very high. They are people aged 18 to 24 who, regardless of whether they have finished lower compulsory secondary education, do not contin­ue their studies by taking a baccalaureate, vocational education and training or any unregulated training course. Currently, 1 in 5 young people aged 18 to 24 are in that situation. As underscored by Gortázar (2018), the economic boom of the 1990s, the bubble in the construction sector and other low-productivity sectors changed the qualification needs for the workforce and altered a whole generation’s financial motivations and decisions, which led to early school leaving from 1998 to 2008 of up to 32%. While today’s figures are better than they were in 2008, when the problem affected al­most 1 in 3 people, it is important to underscore that only the deep economic recession managed to bring such leaving down due to a lack of employment oppor­tunities for people with a low educational level.

A second key aspect of the population’s education-re­lated needs is the quality of the knowledge and compe­tencies that education provides. It is about measuring whether the knowledge that people acquire in the dif­ferent educational stages is adequate for contributing to society’s economic and cultural development.

The indicators for the second challenge centre on knowledge and competencies in mathematics, reading comprehension and foreign languages, and they meas­ure the percentage of primary education students aged 9, secondary education students aged 15, and adults who do not attain competencies that are deemed suf­ficient in those subjects. Information on knowledge is limited in some instances because not all the surveys are carried out for all years. In fact, for primary educa­tion, we only have three surveys available: PIRLS for 2006, 2011 and 2016, and TIMSS for 2011 and 2015.

The results point to an improvement in mathematics and reading comprehension knowledge in primary education between 2001 and 2015 or 2016. In mathe­matics, the number of primary education children who did not attain sufficient knowledge fell by almost half (from 12.7% to 7%) in a short period of time (between 2011 and 2015). Something similar happened in reading comprehension. Only 3% of primary education chil­dren did not attain sufficient knowledge in 2016, a per­centage that was significantly lower than in 2011 (6%).

The most comprehensive data series come from PISA and centre on 15-year-old students in compulsory sec­ondary education, which enables information to be had for this age range in six different years since 2000. The results vary from year to year, but broadly speak­ing, the values have remained the same in the last two decades. Approximately 1 in 4 students do not have sufficient mathematics knowledge and, depending on the year, 1 in 5 or 6 do not have sufficient reading com­prehension knowledge.

The last indicator taken into consideration is the one that measures competencies in foreign language use as an adult, the results for which were worse than those for the previous ones. Almost half of the Span­ish population claims not to have sufficient competen­cies in foreign language speaking. This percentage fell slightly between 2011 and 2016 from 49% to 46% of the population. An improvement in foreign language competencies remains an unresolved issue in the Spanish education system.

The third challenge relating to the population’s educa­tion-related needs is that the education system should be inclusive and that the population should be able to access to a system that promotes equal life opportuni­ties for people from different social backgrounds. The main idea underlying this need is that, by investing in human capital, economic growth can be promoted at the same time as progress is made towards balanced so­cial development in the long term.

This challenge includes different aspects relating to ac­cessibility to stimulating educational environments for people from lower social backgrounds, as well as to the asymmetric effect of phenomena such as the repetition of a school year by social background or the evolution of spending by families whose younger members are in educational stages.

The indicators of this third challenge show us that, in Spain, 1 in 2 people whose parents had a low educational level did not manage to attain a higher educational level than their parents. This persistence of low educational levels in two consecutive generations is higher than the European mean, where this happens on average to only 1 in 3 people from this group. The greatest concern is that, among young people aged 25 to 34, the trend is not very encouraging because the persistence of low educational levels from one generation to the next has increased in the last decade.

It should be pointed out that Spain starts from a dis­advantaged position in terms of the population’s edu­cational levels. In 2011, 3 in 4 people aged 25 to 64 had parents who had only been able to attain a low educa­tional level (i.e., at the very most, they had completed compulsory education, which was up to the age of 14 at that time), whereas in Germany in that same year, that only happened to approximately 1 in 10 people of that age. It seems clear that the rapid social improvements that took place in Spain after the country’s transition to democracy allowed many people from humble back­grounds to access a higher level of income than their parents had. This unprecedented social change has been key with regard to the recent OECD report (2018b) situating Spain among the countries with a relatively high level of intergenerational income mobility within the European context, in a good position after the Nor­dic countries.

Unfortunately, this so-called ‘social elevator’, which has been quite effective in terms of improving income, does not seem to have had so much success in terms of edu­cational or occupational mobility and, in line with other Mediterranean countries, the OECD (2018b) found a poorer behaviour of educational and occupational mo­bility in Spain. The data are revealing: whereas, in the OECD mean, the ratio of senior managers whose par­ents were manual workers is 1 in 4, in Spain it is less than 1 in 5. Likewise, half of manual workers’ children retain that status in Spain, whereas in the OECD mean, that only happens in a third of the cases.

Based on information from two modules of the Euro­pean Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for 2005 and 2011 and from EADA for 2016, in our results we also observed that hindrance to the so­cial elevator in the education of younger people (aged 25 to 34). We therefore confirmed, as underscored by Avram and Cantó (2017), that social background is a determinant of employment quality for people with the same educational level, which condemns broad strata of the population to jobs that are not only more inse­cure and poorly paid, but also have worse associated benefits. In addition, the aforementioned authors con­cluded that, during the crisis period, social advantage enabled people from families with greater resources to cope better with the financial setbacks of it. Recently, the findings of Salazar et al. (2019) have also pointed to the fact that the crisis lowered the expectations of ado­lescent students (14-year-olds), especially among those whose competencies were at the mean, which resulted in an increase in the role that social background plays in educational inequalities.

Another indicator in which big differences by students’ socioeconomic background were recorded is the repeti­tion of a school year in secondary education. If parents have a low socioeconomic level, 1 in 2 students repeat a school year, whereas this only happens to 1 in 9 students if their parents have a high socioeconomic level. García-Pérez et al. (2014) and Choi et al. (2016) concluded that the repetition of a school year does not improve stu­dents’ learning or competencies and, in many cases, it has a negative impact on academic performance. Con­sequently, these differences by social origin further in-crease the probability of school leaving among students from families with a low socioeconomic level.

Social background also has repercussions on the com­petencies that students acquire in mathematics and especially in reading comprehension. In 2015, the per­centage of people who did not attain sufficient compe­tencies in both areas was three times higher among stu­dents from low social backgrounds than among those from high social backgrounds.

Lastly, an inclusive education system should not require overly burdensome private spending on books, school materials, fees or any other learning-related need at school. If it did, the achievement of learning objectives could differ depending on the purchasing power of the families in which students live. To analyse whether there have been any changes in the cost of education for Spanish families in the last decade, we constructed an indicator that measures the percentage of people living in families with members under the age of 25 in which private spending on education is higher than 10% of to­tal family spending. Such spending includes the cost of textbooks and regular payments to educational estab­lishments offering primary, secondary, baccalaureate, vocational education and training, and higher educa­tion (fees, registration, etc.), including master’s degree, language and information technology courses, as well as payments to academies or private tutors.

The results reveal that, in 2006, 2.4% of the population fell within this group and that the figure has doubled since then. Currently, 6% of people exceed that level of spending. The burden of private spending on education as a proportion of total spending differs significantly be­tween families with different income levels. Thus, the percentage of the population whose spending on educa­tion-related goods and services is higher than 10% of to­tal spending increases as family income increases. Only 2.5% of the population that falls within the poorest 20% (first quintile) allocates more than 10% of total spend­ing to educational goods and services, whereas nearly 14% of the population that falls within the wealthiest 20% does so. At all income levels, the percentage of the population that incurred such spending increased from 2006 to 2017. It doubled for the poorest and tripled for the wealthiest.

Lastly, in this challenge we considered it very impor­tant to measure the degree of segregation in schools by student’s socioeconomic background. The literature studying the repercussions of segregating students by socioeconomic background at different education­al establishments has identified impacts on learning, competencies and social integration, and concludes that it is a major hindrance to schools playing a de­cisive role in social cohesion. The more segregated a school is, the more it will reproduce and perpetuate existing inequalities in society, thereby preventing the benefits of a social mix. To measure segregation, we have used a very simple indicator that also enables it to be measured in each socioeconomic group of in­terest (students from low, medium and high social backgrounds) in relation to the education system as a whole. The interpretation of this index of local segre­gation is more intuitive and easier to understand: it is the percentage of students who would have to change educational establishment so that there is no segrega­tion in the education system.

The results reveal that school segregation tends to be structural in nature, and there have been few changes in the period analysed. It was situated between 21.4% and 23.8% with a certain downward tendency between 2003 and 2012 and slight increase from then to 2015. This result indicates that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 stu­dents should change school so that there is no segre­gation. Eighty percent of such segregation is explained by the concentration of students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds in certain educational establishments. In other words, nearly 1 in 2 students from high or low socioeconomic backgrounds should change educational establishment so that there is no segregation. In contrast, students from a medium so­cioeconomic background contribute to just 20% of total segregation, which indicates that there is a much better distribution of these students across education­al establishments.