The continuing activity during the 2017-2018 academic year has gone from 13 centers to 154 centers with continuing education in the present year 2022-2023, with the majority of public centers being involved. The Department of Education has announced that it is about to take out the Foral Order to regulate class hours, which, as the educational community has requested, will first collect data and make a thorough diagnosis.

The Department of Education says that the opinions of the associations of parents, the directors of the centers and the teachers have been collected to analyze the pedagogical, academic, organizational and conciliatory effects of the time organization.

The Government has explained that the experimental nature of the change has ended and that in the course of 2024-2025 all the centres will have to decide their day again.

Continuous vs. divided, source of discussions

In the process of moving from the start to the continuous, a group of parents denounced the past course, criticizing that it was a decision made without discussion by the management of the center, and that the continuous work is counterproductive, especially if it is considered that it supposes an excess of hours followed for the students of Infant Education and a meal too late. From a pedagogical point of view, this group of fathers and mothers has stressed that the last hours of the morning are more expensive than those of the afternoon, and that continuing education is not inclusive, but harms the most disadvantaged students and families with less flexibility, “because only these students are left to attend the afternoon in the after-school activities they organize in their own school”. As for coexistence, they add that “from 16:30 onwards the condition of the meeting point of the patio is lost”.

They are also fathers and mothers with a very different opinion, and as reported in Argia, in the schools of continuing education the assessment is very positive and “the best value has been in the centers where there are many families most in need, such as the gloved schools”. One of the keys to this is that free after-school activities are offered in the center in the evenings. They say that continuous schooling reduces the absenteeism of students (because they did not go to school in the afternoon) and that school conflicts are reduced, “which can be understood related to the elimination of the two hours of the afternoon or the fact that children only work quieter in the morning”. Instead of children having between 8 and 9 hours in the center, they stress that continued activity is also a way of “recovering the afternoon and family hours”.

The debate is on the table and the diagnosis that the Government of Navarra has on the way can be clarifying to see in practice the influence of different times in different areas.