Sen at school: Amartya Sen's capability approach applied to education in Spain

Amartya Sen's best-known idea is easy to say and hard to apply. In The Idea of Justice and the work that led to it, he argues that we should judge how well people are doing by what they can actually do and be, their capabilities, more than by the income or resources they hold. Schools are one of the places where the idea bites hardest, because a school can spend the same on every pupil and still send them out with very different freedoms.

The idea, in Sen's terms

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry, by Ingrid Robeyns and Morten Fibieger Byskov, sets out the vocabulary. Capabilities are the things a person could do or be if they chose, such as being well nourished, being educated, travelling. Functionings are the capabilities that have been realised. Between resources and capabilities sit conversion factors: personal, social and environmental conditions that decide whether a person can turn a set of means into a real capability. A ramp and a staircase cost the same to a person who walks.

Sen wrote directly about education in a short 1997 editorial in World Development, "Human Capital and Human Capability". His point was that the economist's idea of human capital is correct as far as it goes: if education makes a person more productive, that is a gain. But even with the same income, he wrote, a person benefits from education in reading, communicating, arguing, choosing in a more informed way and being taken more seriously by others. Human capital, in his phrase, fits inside the broader perspective of human capability. Education is valuable for what it lets you earn, and valuable in itself.

The idea already shapes how the world counts. UNDP's Human Development Index measures the knowledge dimension with expected years of schooling, capped at 18, and mean years of schooling, capped at 15, and its technical notes describe each dimension as a proxy for capabilities. Years of schooling are a rough proxy, though, and the scholars who carried Sen into education have spent two decades pushing past them. The Stanford entry credits Melanie Walker and Elaine Unterhalter, whose 2007 book Amartya Sen's Capability Approach and Social Justice in Education is the reference work, and Lorella Terzi, who used the approach to argue that justice in education requires particular attention to disability and special educational needs.

Three things it changes in a school

The first is what we measure. Years enrolled and money spent are inputs. A capability reading asks what a pupil can do at 16: read a contract, follow an argument in a newspaper, handle a percentage, write a complaint that gets answered. Spain's law has moved some way in this direction. The LOMLOE's ESO decree, Royal Decree 217/2022, defines a perfil de salida, an exit profile of the key competences every pupil should have at the end of basic education, adapted from the EU Council's 2018 recommendation on key competences. The decree calls it the ultimate reference for judging performance. What it lacks is a floor that is measured and guaranteed.

The second is how resources are shared. If conversion factors differ, equal spending per pupil delivers unequal freedom. A pupil who starts primary without having been read to, or with a hearing impairment, needs more to reach the same functioning. That gives a principled basis for weighting funding by need, and also a test for it: the extra money is justified by the capability it produces.

The third is how we see adults. Spain's evaluation institute summarises the OECD's 2023 adult skills survey this way: 37% of Spanish adults have low skills, meaning level 1 or below in literacy or numeracy, against an OECD average of 31%. Level 2, the bulletin notes, is the level that lets a person manage with more autonomy at work, in learning and in daily life. For a third of adults, the capability school was meant to give never arrived or has faded.

A capability floor

The left is right that education is a capability owed to every person, and that pupils facing disadvantage or disability need more than others to reach the same freedom. The market-liberal tradition is right that education is also human capital, and that schools should answer for skills that can be measured and that people use at work; Sen himself kept that part inside his framework.

The position that fits neither camp, and follows from Sen, is a capability floor. Take the perfil de salida and turn its core into a short list of skills every pupil must reach by 16, assessed each year with the census tests Spain is building, and published by school. Fund schools according to how hard it is for their pupils to reach the floor, with the formula reviewed against results. Above the floor, leave schools free to take pupils as far as they can go. And extend the promise to adults: anyone below level 2 should have a right to a free course that takes them there, run by the adult schools and vocational centres that already exist, and judged by whether people reach the level.

Sen's comparative method suits this well. Nobody needs to agree on the perfect curriculum to agree that a country where more than a third of adults struggle with a text or a sum can do better, and to measure each step towards it.