La educación primaria en España y la diversidad cultural

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, and especially during the 2000s, the arrival of students of foreign origin in the Spanish education system has been a major challenge and has caused tension. Faced with this new reality, primary schools have been incorporating in their discourse and planning (school documents) and in their practices the need to act in order to incorporate the newly arrived students and to ensure that all students perceive cultural diversity as something present and normal in contemporary societies. The work presented here, based on a survey of 1,730 representatives of school management teams, analyzes their degree of concreteness in documents and the practical development of intercultural education. The results indicate that although important steps have been taken, they also show that there is still a long way to go. Especially in schools with a lower presence of students of foreign origin who perceive, less than the rest, that this issue is a priority for them and act less in this direction.