INS Thos i Codina, Mataró (Catalonia - Spain)

  • Our school is a Secondary and Vocational Training School located in Mataró, 30 kms northern Barcelona, on the Eastern coast of Spain. It is a disfavoured industrial area where a 18% of our students are immigrants from Morocco, Subsaharian countries, Latin America, China and Easter European countries. Most parents work in unqualified jobs and a high percertage of them are both unemployed.

    School population: 800 students. 500 students in secondary studies and 300 in vocational training. We have a staff of 90 teachers, 6 administrative staff and 1 specialist in social integration.

    Our school has participated many transnational projects in the last six years. The majority of students have no opportunities to use a foreign language outside the classroom doors. We aim to share our multicultural identity as a cohesive factor and use it to enable students to understand their differences as well as a common foreign challenge; the study of a vehicular language which can give them some light in their future and also to give them some values as human beings, because us, teachers , work as older brothers or sisters, parents, psychologists and friends, with our students due to the lack of values, education and disfunctional families in which our students have been brought up.

    We want them to meet a common foreign culture which deepens their lack of cultural sensitivity and curiosity towards other cultures. Many students feel that learning a foreign language is useless as they won’t have the chance to use it. One of the problems in our school is the integration of the Moroccan community especially the difference of equality between boys and girls.

    Our websites: http://www.iesthosicodina.cat