In a country where the school drop-out rate is around twice the European average, Generation Y met those swimming against the tide. We went to Barcelona to talk to young people who have decided to go back school.<br /><br />Almost 10 years ago, Lucas Martos decided to quit school. He says he couldn’t see the point in continuing: “Before, I wasn’t interested in school. I was younger, that’s true, but I didn’t see any point in it, it wasn’t producing any results. And I knew that outside school, as a 16-year-old, I could be making money. At that time, I just thought school was a waste of time.”<br /><br />Lucas worked in construction and manual jobs. But a health problem forced him to stop temporarily. Then he decided to finish high school and study to become a lab technician. <br /><br />“Even the idea of coming back frightened me. But I’m more mature now, so I decided to try. It’s like work: you have to persevere, you have to keep it together. It’s the same thing here,” Lucas says. “Whenever I was around people who went to university and the conversation turned to culture or education, I felt out of it. When I finally finished high school, I told my girlfriend: now I can play Trivial Pursuit and answer some questions.”<br /><br />Mar Corredor had also been also looking for answers for almost a year.<br /><br />“I started to skip classes and finally I stopped going. I had no motivation, I didn’t like it, I didn’t understand where it was leading,” she says.<br /><br />A volunteering experience made her think about kick-starting her education, this time training to work with people with special needs.<br /><br />“You have to, because employers are always asking for more degrees, more masters, more whatever, just to be able to work somewhere,” she says.<br /><br />Lucas and Mar decided to go back to school themselves, but many in their situation don’t. It is they who are the focus of a new European Erasmus Plus programme aimed at bringing the drop-out rate below 10% by 2020. <br /><br />However, that is a very ambitious target concedes Xavier Chavarria Navarro, head of the Prevention School Drop-Out project: <br /><br />“Now, in Spain, it’s around 30%. Until recently there was lots of work in construction, now it’s tourism. Most are jobs that don’t require specific training and you don’t have to have qualifications to make money.”<br /><br />The crisis, particularly in construction, left many youngsters without a job and some had little education. Xavier Chavarria Navarro works to keep 16-24 year-olds in or bring them back to the education system. <br /><br />“We can adjust the curricular programme according to their interests, providing an interesting and attractive educational process that makes sense to them,” he says.<br /><br />“If they’re helping you to go down the path of returning to study, showing you what steps to take to make it easier, I think it can be very positive,” says Lucas Martos.<br /><br />Xavier Chavarria Navarro says every case is treated individually. “We can guide young people, and the schools that integrate them, to a customised type of orientation, diversifying the curricula in order to make it more attractive to them.”<br /><br />The Generation Y stories continue on our social media pages.
