OUR SCHOOL

       The school was inaugurated in 1904.  The first building was the ancient Laurent Palace, placed in Santiago Street, in the historical centre of Alcalá.  It had an extension of 5112 square mettres and was bought for 40,000 ptas (around 260 Euros) to the Mendoza family.  The place where the school is built, in the centre of a city declared World Heritage in 1998, together with the high educational level taught in our school, have made out of this school an emblematic place for the education of many citizens from Alcalá, both men and women, many of whom are still attached to the school, either personally as teachers, or bringing their children and even grandchildren to the school.

               At the beginning it was only a girls-school, with approximately a hundred students, fifty of them with a full scholarship for their education.  Classes were based on General Culture, French, Music and Sewing.

               Apart from the years of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939, in which the building was occupied by the Popular Front), the school has never closed its doors to children, and has enlarged throughout this century not only its surface, but also the number of students and the studies offered.  Today, our school counts with more than a thousand students from 22 nationalities, and offers every level of education before university (our students’ ages vary from 3 to 21).

OUR IDENTITY

                All Escolapias schools, spread out all over Spain and the world, conceive education as a service to children under the inspiration of José de Calasanz and Paula Montal.  The first one, back in the XVIIth century, when education was reserved to those families who could pay for an instructor, created schools where anybody from any social class, specially the most underprivileged ones, could go without any discrimination based on race or religion, and gave birth to a “popular and Christian” school.

              His message and method, even though was started in Italy, came to Spain two centuries later throughout the person of Paula Montal.  She renovated the concept of school, including women in the process of education (low-class girls had been up to that moment totally apart from the possibility of getting a proper education).  That process was based on the help to families and the complicity between teachers and parents, searching for a major goal: the education of girls.

·         José de Calasanz opted for a popular education.  Nowadays, our school is open to cultural diversity and to any social class.

·         Paula Montal wished the promotion of women in society.  Our school offers a co-educational system since 1939.

·         Our educational proposal comprises the integral education of children, offering them the basis to achieve personal growth and the professional abilities needed in our society.

·         The identifying mark of our school is the education of free-judging people, with a coherent system of human values.

·         We conceive school as a big family, based on comprehension and the involvement of students, and parents and teachers in the process of education.

·         Flexibility and openness characterise our staff.

·         We encourage teachers training throughout the years.

·         Our pedagogy is simple and clear, with scientific rigour, always catching up with scientific advances.

·         The school and its teachings are concerned with the always-changing necessities of society and the city.

THE SPANISH EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

               The Spanish Educational System follows the actual law LOE (Organic Law on Education) from 2006.  It is a comprehensive school, that is, our school offers all educational levels before university:

            -Pre-primary Education (3 to 6 years)

            -Primary Education (6 to 12 years)

            -Lower Secondary Education (12 to 16 years)

            -Upper Secondary Education (16 to 18 years)

            -Specific Vocational Training: Administrative and Auxiliary Nursing (16 years onwards)

            -Spanish as a Foreign Language (only for newcomers. 12 to 16 years)

 “Garantía Social” (for students that, having abandoned studies, aim to obtain a       professional training. 16 to 21 years)

It is a private school sustained with public funds in every level but Upper Secondary Education.

INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS

               The school has always been concerned about ensuring that all our students receive an education complete and integral, therefore offering the largest variety of possible educational areas.  For this reason, in 1999 the school decided to join international projects, knowing that the future to our children goes without any doubt through the learning and mastering of other languages as well as the knowledge of other cultures.  Both the ELOS project and the various exchange projects we are engaged in are meant to develop and enrich our students’ abilities in terms of languages and the knowledge of European cultures.

              THE ELOS PROJECT: Elos stands for “Europe as a learning environment in schools”.  It is both a school programme and a Comenius 3 (Socrátes) network.  It is an ambitious project that prepares students in Secondary School on their role as European citizens, by immersing them in a European learning environment.  The participating schools will subscribe to a European oriented curriculum in the subject areas and in international activities. Schools that work together as partner schools within the European Elos Network can be characterised as follows:

• They participate in a national quality network that develops a European and International orientation.

• They are involved in structural international exchange activities with several schools abroad, and strive towards embedding these activities in the school curriculum and school work plans to ensure coherence and sustainability.

• They work towards the implementation of European key competencies inside and outside the classroom (knowledge, skills, and attitudes that pupils need for their future as European citizens).

• They make use of jointly developped documents, such as the Elos portfolio, and other instruments to measure and certify achievements.

               During the next three years, our school will be involved in a Comenius project within the Elos network based on the Study and Analysis of Media in Europe.  Schools from The Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Lithuania, Turkey and Norway will participate in this project.

                STUDENTS EXCHANGE PROJECTS: Under the aims of these projects, students go to a school in another European country and stay in a host family of a partner school student.  In a different period, each student will have a foreign guest in his/her house.  During the project, students and teachers from both schools collaborate with each other on a certain theme. 

              Right now, our school is working to settle contacts with schools from the Netherlands, Italy and France.

              “CELULA EUROPA”: The main objective of this project is that any student with any age grows with the consciousness of being a European citizen.  In order to do so, we organise activities all throughout the school (from the youngest students to the oldest ones) that will hopefully prepare our children to a European citizenship.  From this year onwards, the school project will be as follows:

              We assign a country from the European Union to each class in the school, and through the months, they become “specialists” on that country, learning about the flag, the capital, languages spoken, hymn and symbols, famous people born in the country, geography, gastronomy, culture and folklore.  All the knowledge gathered along the year will be shown on May 9, Europe’s Day, in which many activities are organised to present the results, and the students will participate in cultural contests adapted to the various ages. 

As the students grow, they will learn about all the countries in the Union, and the consciousness of being European citizens will hopefully grow inside them.

OUR CITY

            Alcalá de Henares is a city near Madrid (30 Kms away) that counts with 200.000 citizens, devoted in its major part to the secondary and tertiary sectors of economy, therefore it is in a medium, medium-high income bracket within the Autonomous Community of Madrid.  It also has a high percentage (around a 12%) of inmigrants with very low income.

           The city of Alcalá, birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, was declared World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1998, due to three main reasons:

a)                  a) Alcalá was the first city to be designed and built solely as a seat of a university, and was to serve as a model for other centres of learning in Europe and America.

b)       The concept of and ideal city, that is “the city of God” (Civitas Dei), was for the first time materialised in Alcalá.

c)       The contribution of Alcalá to the intellectual development of humankind, the advances in linguistics that took place there, and the definition of the Spanish Language, specially through the work of its greatest son, Miguel de Cervantes, and his masterpiece Don Quixote.

               Its beauty, its wide cultural offer, and its proximity to the capital of Spain have made thousands of foreign students choose our city, either to enlarge their university studies (throughout international programs: Erasmus, Leonardo…) or to learn Spanish through the Cervantes Institute.