El/la educador/a social, ¿un perfil profesional necesario en los equipos de orientación educativa y profesional?

Abstract

Autonomous Communities such as Extremadura, Castilla La Mancha, Andalusia, Canary Islands and Balearic Islands have their own regulations aimed at the professional performance of Social Education in schools, with some similarities and dissimilarities. In these territories, social educators carry out part of their function in and/or in collaboration with guidance teams, especially in Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) centres. The uneven response by the different autonomous educational administrations, in our opinion, calls into question the incorporation of these professionals into all guidance teams, their role and functions, as well as the degree of acceptance or rejection by guidance professionals. In this context of uncertainty regarding the convenience of expanding the teams, we have proposed to know the perceptions of the counselors of public centers of ESO, through a quantitative-descriptive research, in which an ad hoc questionnaire has been applied to a convenience sample of 85 school counselors. The results of the study show two opposing positions in relation to the necessary inclusion of social education in schools, to which we attribute the lack of knowledge of the professional figure of the social educator and the need to clarify their functions in the school context.