Caught in the triangle of mobility: social, residential and pupil mobility

Abstract

This article examines the school choices of families who have recently experienced downward mobility during the economic crisis in Spain. Based on semi-structured interviews we analyse the educational strategies of the families in a Bourdieusian framework, focusing on how they cope with the loss of their perceived social status. Prior to the crisis, these families of working-class origin improved their social position as a result of their success in economic capital accumulation with a humble increase in social and cultural capital. Our research suggests that the concerns of families confronted with downward social mobility are manifested in tensions related to their school choice in terms of their strategies of resistance and negotiation with regards to the ownership, social composition and corresponding perceived quality of the school. School can symbolically represent the last resort, an indispensable investment in one’s own future and that of the next generation.

Keywords:

• Pupil mobility
• foreclosure crisis
• downward social mobility
• school choice
• family strategies

Notes

1. The swift changes of the past decades in Spain have complicated a more classic class structure in three directions: the emergence of a new middle class of professionals, in the process of consolidation, who have benefitted from the expansion of education and new job niches, as well as unskilled workers with little formal education, including large numbers of newly arrived immigrants of different social backgrounds from all over the world since the 1990s. These groups have become extremely vulnerable with the economic crisis since 2008 (Subirats 2012).

2. There are three different types of secondary schools in Spain (data in parentheses detail their proportion of the general school provision in Catalonia): state-owned public schools (62.3%), state-financed private schools (34.3%) and privately financed elite private schools (3.4%). State-financed private schools are non-fee-paying schools in theory, but parents have to pay a one-off registration fee and are ‘invited’ to contribute a monthly fee to the owners’ foundations that varies from a symbolic amount to very high quantities and is perceived by parents as a tuition fee.

3. In Spain, a long decade of economic growth (1995–2007) took place with an overall annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth of 3.5%. By the end of this period (2007), Spain’s GDP per capita was positioned at 105% of the European Union average. While the growth in the 1990s was mainly due to the overall increase in salaries, in the 2000s the main reasons were decreasing mortgage rates and lowering youth unemployment, coupled with a high volume of immigration (García Montalvo 2008; Naredo 2009).

4. When a home buyer fails to deliver a mortgage payment and insolvency is declared, with ‘assignment in payment’, in exchange for handing over the property, the buyer can be exempted from paying back the debt.

5. Debtors, once insolvency is declared, can apply to the bank for a ‘social rent’; that is, to rent a property of the bank at a lower than average rate.