Back to school: the "la Caixa" Foundation accompanies more than 60,000 minors in vulnerable situations and their families with socio-educational support

The "la Caixa" Foundation goes back to school accompanying 61,174 children and adolescents in vulnerable situations and 37,482 families. In order to support them in their learning process and in creating their path towards a better future, the CaixaProinfancia Programme is starting a new school year offering socio-educational support to those who need it most through educational reinforcement, leisure and free time, workshops, psychological care, speech therapy and psychomotor skills, as well as school equipment, glasses and food.

The consequences of the pandemic and the generalised rise in prices have a direct impact on the most vulnerable families, making it difficult for their children to have normal access to education and to the different educational resources and materials necessary in each case. For this reason, this year the "la Caixa" Foundation is once again providing 54,367 school material kits to all the children who are part of CaixaProinfancia, from the age of 6 upwards.

With three different modalities to adapt to each educational cycle (pre-school, primary and secondary), the school kits consist of a backpack and contents that vary for each age group and may include a pencil case (with a multi-coloured pen, pencil, eraser and pencil sharpener), coloured pencils, fluorescent markers, an A4 notebook, a set of rulers, a compass, a scientific calculator and ecological file covers.

This school material is sent to families through the more than 400 social organisations throughout the country that run the CaixaProinfancia Programme in their areas, with the involvement of educational centres and the public administration.

In Spain, 1 in 3 children suffer from child poverty, inherited from parents to children. This situation not only translates into a lack of economic resources, but also into the difficulty of accessing the resources necessary for a quality education. This reality has been aggravated by the social and economic crisis, affecting households that until now had a certain stability and have unexpectedly found themselves in more difficult circumstances, which has led to more children being at risk of vulnerability.

The programme has been working for more than 15 years on the premise that environmental conditions, such as health, family organisation and social network directly influence learning processes and schooling, so that children and adolescents living in vulnerable contexts have more difficulty in achieving success at school.

CaixaProinfancia's services aim to develop each participant's basic skills, improve study habits, promote autonomy in learning, increase expectations of the possibility of success, and boost academic results and school performance. The aim is also to improve the child's self-esteem and empowerment, and to strengthen the processes of socialisation and social inclusion in order to break the cycle of poverty.