Exercise: the mobility ladder (I): a child born poor in Spain in 2026, from birth to 16

This week's exercise asks us to follow one child. She is born in 2026 in a low-income household somewhere in Spain, and we design every public rung she meets on her way to 30: early years, school, grants, first job, first home. Each rung goes through the five-column test we built in week 2: Goal | Who decides? | Who implements? | Who can veto? | How do we know it worked? Today covers birth to 16. Tomorrow takes her from 16 to 30.

The starting point is the size of the gap she faces. INE's 2023 module on the intergenerational transmission of poverty found that among adults aged 25 to 59 who grew up in a household in a bad or very bad financial situation, 23.3% hold a degree. Among those who grew up comfortably, 53.1% do. When parents had at most lower secondary education, 36.2% of their children reached higher education; when parents had a degree, 77.4% did. That is the social elevator Democracia 21 says it wants to repair, and the data show where it jams.

Rung one: the first three years

Spain does well on average. According to the OECD figures published by the government in 2024, 41.8% of children under three were in early years education in 2022, up 9.9 points in a decade, and 64.2% of two-year-olds, against 38.6% in the EU. The average hides who is missing. A Save the Children survey reported in 2019 found 62.5% attendance among better-off families and 26.3% among the poorest, and the main reason families gave was that they could not afford it.

Our child is most likely to be in the missing group. So the rung is the one in our early years proposal: a free place, offered automatically to every household drawing the minimum income or the child supplement, with funding that follows her to any accredited centre. This is the rung Anthony Giddens's social investment state puts first, and a lottery where places run short is Karl Popper's piecemeal testing in its simplest form.

• Goal: close the attendance gap by income within five years.
• Who decides? The state sets the entitlement; regions set the standards for accreditation.
• Who implements? Regions and town councils, with public and accredited private centres.
• Who can veto? Regions that don't sign up and councils short of places, so the money comes with a deadline and a fallback provider.
• How do we know? Attendance by income quintile, published every year, and a lottery wherever demand exceeds places, which gives a clean comparison.

Rung two: reading by eight

Primary school is where the first warning sign appears, and Spain tends to answer it late, by making children repeat. EsadeEcPol's 2024 report for the ministry finds that more than two in ten 15-year-olds have repeated a year, close to 22% against 9.1% in the OECD, and that low-income pupils repeat four times as often as high-income ones, the second-largest gap of any country. Public spending on repetition in primary and ESO came to between €1,448 and €1,704 million in 2021–22.

The rung for our child is an early check on reading and maths in the first years of primary, with small-group tutoring the moment she falls behind, paid for by moving money out of repetition. We set out the details in support and stretch in the same classroom. The Spanish evidence on tutoring is encouraging and honest. A 2026 CEP paper on an online maths tutoring programme that started as a pilot and was then run by regional authorities found that the scaled version raised end-of-year grades by 0.15 standard deviations, about a third of the pilot's effect. A third of a strong effect, at scale, is still worth having, and it tells us to budget for the drop.

• Goal: every child reading fluently by eight, and every gap caught within a term.
• Who decides? Regions, within a national entitlement to tutoring.
• Who implements? Schools, with tutors hired through programmes such as PROA+.
• Who can veto? Schools that treat the check as paperwork; the check feeds the school's improvement plan, so it counts.
• How do we know? Census assessments at fourth year of primary, published by school with progress measures.

Rung three: ESO without the trapdoor

Between 12 and 16 the risk becomes leaving. Funcas's 2026 report puts Spain's early school leaving rate at 12.8% in 2025, still well above the EU's 9% target for 2030. For young people whose mothers have primary education or less, the rate is 32.9%; when the mother has a degree, it is 2.4%. Our child sits in the first group.

Her rung in ESO combines two things. The school keeps her with her class and adds support when she struggles, which is what Spanish law already intends when it makes repetition exceptional. And it gives room to go further in the subjects where she is strong, because stretch is part of mobility too. The evidence on repetition says it helps only when extra support comes with it, and the support is what does the work.

• Goal: fewer pupils repeating and fewer leaving, with results that hold steady or improve.
• Who decides? Regions and school leadership.
• Who implements? Teachers, tutors and guidance staff.
• Who can veto? Staff who see the change as lowering standards, so the measure includes attainment as well as promotion.
• How do we know? Repetition, attainment and early leaving by school and by family background.

The joins

Each rung on its own is fairly familiar. The weak points are the joins: from early years to school, from primary to ESO, from ESO to whatever comes at 16. A child can pass every rung on paper and still fall between them, because each stage belongs to a different office with its own files.

So the design needs one piece that belongs to no single camp. Our child carries a single educational record from her first place in early years to 16, protected and visible only to the professionals working with her, and that record has triggers. A missed early-years place, a failed reading check, a second term of falling grades or a run of absences each sends her case to a named person who has to act within weeks. The left gets the automatic entitlement. The market-liberal tradition gets money that follows the child and programmes judged on results. The record and its triggers make the ladder one route, and they keep in view what Amartya Sen would ask of it: what this particular child is able to do and become at each age. At 16 she reaches the earnings-replacement grant, and tomorrow we follow her up the rest of the way.