Millionaire European funds for Early Childhood Education, from 0 to 3 years old, are currently in a dead end in Andalusia.

The central government, chaired in office by the socialist Pedro Sánchez, established, without any coordination with the autonomous communities, that these funds should be used to create new places in public centers.

But in Andalusia, a model of nursery schools has been operating for years in which the Andalusian Administration rewards families, based on their income, places in centers that, for the most part, are not public.

This system was implemented in the 2017/2018 academic year, during the period of the socialist Susana Díaz as president of the Junta de Andalucía, and has continued with the Executive of the popular Juanma Moreno.

If the Board began to open new public nurseries with European funds, following the guidelines of the central government, the private centers that are now in operation would be endangered. Some 15,000 people work there, most of them women.

The model that is in force in Andalusia is fundamentally based on privately owned centers that are adhered to the public aid program of the Junta, in which families who enroll their children in these nursery schools receive bonuses based on income.

In the current Andalusian model from 0 to 3 years old, there are 2,163 centers of different ownership: 1,442 private affiliated to the Junta’s family aid program, 551 owned by other public entities also adhered to the Andalusian Administration plan, 170 public owned by the Board and more than 200 that operate completely privately.

The enrollment rate in early childhood education, in the age group from 0 to 3 years, is 53.06% of the population, one of the highest in the autonomous communities, and well above the recommendations of the European Union , which stands at 33%.

Furthermore, this enrollment rate, with the current model, has increased by more than 10 points since the 2018-2019 academic year (when it was 42.61%). For this reason, the sources of the Junta consider that the model that works in the Andalusian community is a success.

In 2021, the Ministry of Education decided that the 671 million euros available from the European Union (EU) Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (MRR) would be used to create 65,382 public places in the first cycle of Early Childhood Education, the that goes from 0 to 3 years. Since then, the Board has been asking the central government to allow it to use these funds to subsidize places in existing centers instead of creating new public places. But the request has fallen on deaf ears.

The execution that is being developed in Andalusia, in the Ministry of Educational Development, directed by Patricia del Pozo, on the EU funds of the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism is striking.

At the end of 2022, of the 140 million euros of activated credit, a total of 113 million had been made available and 110 million had been executed. Virtually all the programs – on entrepreneurship classrooms in Vocational Training (FP) centers and teacher training, among other subjects – have almost 100% of the budget executed.

On the other hand, from the program for the creation of new places in early childhood education, for which a budget of almost 30 million euros was reserved, not a single euro has been executed, according to the balance of the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Funds Europeans, directed by Carolina España, to which EL MUNDO had access.

Despite everything, the Andalusian Government is participating in the program to attract European funds to create public places in Early Childhood Education and has implemented a call aimed at creating new public places in Andalusian municipalities where the offer is scarcer.

The first call has resulted, as the Board anticipated in advance, a failure of participation, since of the almost 30 million mentioned above, only projects worth 2.7 million have been approved, although they have not yet been executed. For this reason, in the balance, 0 euros appears in the “executed credit” box.

Currently, the Andalusian Government is immersed in the administrative development of the next call, with the aim of granting a longer term and new opportunities to local entities that could not adhere to the first one, in addition to completing some extensions in the ownership centers of the Board.

Now, the Andalusian Government intends that the central compute in the European funds program the growth in the schooling rate, something that has been increasing in Andalusia in recent years. The Andalusian Executive has defended that if Andalusia could allocate European funds to free, subsidizing the places, as is done now, it would take an almost definitive step towards the total free cycle for all Andalusian families.