Los centros de educación infantil y primaria de la Región de Murcia ante la incorporación del alumnado extranjerola valoración de las familias

Abstract

ABSTRACT The title of this research is `Families' opinions about the incorporation of foreign students in Pre-schools and Primary schools in Murcia. Its main objective is to find out the families' opinions about different changes that have been taken place and as a result have modified the measures that schools have taken regarding the incorporation of such students. The theoretical justification of this research is the great importance that this particular group of students presents in order to establish improvement proposals at schools. For this reason, the main purpose of this research has been to contrast and value the opinions of this school sector throughout different dimensions. In order to achieve this goal, 2193 families from 17 private and public schools in different areas of Murcia have taken part in this research. In this way, a representative sample of the region has been obtained. This research is divided into three parts. The first part consists of a theoretical framework, dealing with the present situation at schools as a result of the presence of foreign students. To this end, the concepts caused by this phenomenon have been considered and the corresponding possible educational measures to be taken into account to deal with diversity through different action plans in all educational sectors have been analysed. A previous study of different investigations related to the topic and the legal framework surrounding the admission of foreign students at schools, as well as family participation in schools in Spain (particularly in Murcia) have been included to develop this part of the research. The second part deals with the methodological design that has been used in this research, which is a mixture of a quantitative perspective through `Likert type' questionnaires aimed at families and a qualitative perspective through debate groups to add and contrast information from questionnaires. In this part, you will find an analysis of the results obtained through these methods. Finally, the conclusions and improvement measures from the results obtained are discussed in the third part. The results show that families, both national and foreign, do not often take part in school matters such as school meetings, tutorial sessions, associations or extra-curricular activities. Their opinion about multicultural aspects is not quite positive, since they think that multiculturalism influences the students' academic results, whereas the families of foreign students consider cultural diversity a positive aspect in school matters. This is a remarkable fact considering that the amount of personal and material resources at schools is good, although they consider the latter are in short supply and out-dated. As far as, the educational training that families get at schools, some consider that it is appropriate, although a high percentage of families are unaware of the availability of this training at schools. To conclude, it can be stated that it is necessary to carry out some educational changes at schools in order to increase the participation of families and have more contact by means of a suitable educational action plan and to obtain efficient and inclusive schools.