What is a Concerted School

As a general guideline, education systems present three different modalities: school public, private school and concerted school. The first is proposed as a public service oriented to the whole of society, the second has a profit-oriented orientation and the concerted school becomes an intermediate point between the private and the public. In this sense, there has sometimes been talk of a semi-public school.

General approach

The concerted school comes from the noun concert, which is an agreement or agreement between two entities. In this case, the two entities that reach an agreement are: the state and the company, always within the framework of education. Thus, a concerted educational center is one that is maintained with public funds but its management is private. In this sense, the state assumes a series of responsibilities: it pays the workers' payroll, proposes a educational model and establishes general conditions that must be observed (number of teaching hours, ratios, subjects ...).

On the other hand, the school is responsible for the hiring staff and can maintain a certain autonomy with respect to their educational tradition, as we can observe in the concerted religious schools that, on the one hand, follow the public model and maintain signs of identity own as the presence of religion in classes, internal rules ...

The debate on educational models

The education system tends to elicit an intense debate between citizenship, some are in favor of promoting and consolidating the public school model, since it is a teaching with a universal character and that guarantees the equality of opportunities. Others understand that the private school allows educational approaches independent of the tutelage of the State, the concerted school represents a synthesis of the two previous approaches. On the one hand, it has an undeniable public dimension, but without renouncing the autonomy stipulated in the concert.

In this way, the state provides citizens with another model of education, in which parents without depending on the economic aspect that a private school may entail, can choose a different kind of education for their children than the public one.

From the point of view of the state, the charter school usually represents a significant saving, since the salaries of the teachers are lower than those of the public school

From the point of view of the teaching center, the agreed formula allows the economic viability of the center and the maintenance of particular values. Finally, from the point of view of families, this model broadens the range of options for teaching their children.

Photos: Fotolia - Noam / Melpomene