Policies, Practices and Barriers to the Inclusion of Vulnerable Children in Public Early Childhood Education Networks: The Case of Barcelona's Ebms

Research on ECEC reveals that, despite the benefits attached to it, vulnerable families still face barriers to access. Despite promoting more and more diverse inclusivity policies -before and after enrolment- these barriers persist among public schools, posing challenges for the so-called “new family policies”. These inequalities are also seen in Barcelonas’s Escoles Bressol Municipals (EBM): a network of nursery schools, publicly owned and managed by the Municipality. EBMs even represent the preferences of the city’s professional middle-classes. However, the representation of vulnerable families is limited compared to their demographic prevalence in certain districts.

This contribution studies how a public network addresses the needs of vulnerable families, focusing on inclusion and equity policies adopted by EBMs and the obstacles to their implementation.

The research involved interviews with 22 School Directors from the 108 EBM across the 10 city districts and high-vulnerability neighbourhoods. It is complemented with the exploitation of data on EBMs and ECEC in Spain and ethnographic research conducted during the 2024 School Visiting Days in 7 EBMs.

This contribution shows that EBMs have progressively adopted inclusion policies, like a sliding scale for school-fees and diversifying schools across neighbourhoods. Also identifies and explains the economic, bureaucratic and socio-cultural barriers that persist in EBM.

Moreover, it will analyse the Directors’ strategies (with varying formalisation degrees) for the inclusion of these families. First: how to encourage them to apply and enrol. Secondly: the ways they make schools more flexible to help them to remain in. Third: the strategies to alleviate families' challenges, particularly migrants. Fourthly: the coordination between skateholders in the networks of services for vulnerable children.

Finally, we assess the potential and challenges in equity for the EBMs, a well-stablished brand of early childhood education in the city of Barcelona with inclusive principles but unevenly accessible across the city’s social classes.