Barcelona (Spain), 28th October 2025 | The Director General of OIDEL, Ignasi Grau i Callizo, was invited on Monday to appear before the Ponència de la Proposició de llei de garanties del finançament del sistema educatiu català amb un mínim del 6% del PIB per a l’educació at the Parliament of Catalonia.
In his speech, Ignasi Grau emphasized the need for all education policies inspired by human rights to incorporate the principle of educational pluralism, noting that “without funding to guarantee it, pluralism becomes a privilege rather than a right.”
During his presentation, the OIDEL director —an international organization based in Switzerland with consultative status before UNESCO and the UN Economic and Social Council— shared three key ideas:
- A human rights-based approach requires recognizing educational pluralism.
- Funding must ensure that all families can choose schools regardless of their economic status.
- Educational pluralism contributes to social cohesion.
Grau highlighted that international treaties on the right to education —such as Article 26.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights— explicitly recognize parents’ right to choose their children’s education and civil society’s right to establish educational institutions. Ignoring this dimension, he warned, “means disregarding a fundamental part of the right to education.”
The OIDEL director also noted that in many European countries, such as Ireland, Belgium, or the Netherlands, more than 50% of students attend non-governmental schools fully funded by public authorities, showing that pluralism and social cohesion are not opposing concepts.
He also shared recent OIDEL research, conducted with the Social Research Institute of CEU San Pablo University, which shows greater social mobility in countries where schools of social initiative receive full public funding. He also cited a 2012 OECD report demonstrating that higher public funding of non-governmental schools reduces the socioeconomic gap between public and private institutions.
In his closing remarks, Grau encouraged members of the Parliament to use this legislative initiative to strengthen the education system as a whole:
“This is an opportunity to improve funding of the education system for everyone. If you decide to exclude schools of social initiative and the thousands of families who choose them, do so, but not in the name of human rights.”
