After reading most of the academic production by Professor Escudero on school failure, I thought that the prospect of educational exclusion that he suggested would enable me to understand this phenomenon, focusing on factors that normally are not incidental. I could direct my attention not so much towards the result as the process, hence not setting all the blame on the “victims” of it, but rather upon other stakeholders.

The focus upon educational exclusion plays here a crucial role: education is a basic right for humans not alone for what it represents, but mainly for being a Gateway to other rights to materialize.

It is the Curriculum Diversification Program and the Initial Vocational Training Program where I have carried on my research upon educational exclusion because both are aimed to getting a necessary and sufficient support to provide students with great difficulty in achieving the expected learning goals with the appropriate education they deserve. Both programs are devised as extraordinary measures to achieve this objective because they segregate students from their peer group, offering different curricula to those found in regular classrooms of secondary school, even if it is legally possible to achieve in the end the same degree: Graduate in Compulsory Education. These programs are able to provide excellent academic results and increase the number of students enrolled in them. However, my research question is whether what is proposed as a solution, albeit an emergency ends up being really so or conversely, whether they only represent a strategy whose main objective is to reduce school failure in the simplest way: by lowering the levels of education.

Therefore, in line with the foregoing considerations, the basic question of the thesis is as follows: Is the Educational Administration in the Region of Valencia raising Curricular Diversification Programs and Initial Vocational Training Program as instruments of educational inclusion or exclusion? Two possible answers are foreseen: They will provide inclusive education if they raise students’ knowledge acquisition in these programs similar levels to those of ordinary classrooms, or at least the basics, using various means and methods, but largely without changing other components of the curriculum –goals, content, basic skills and evaluation criteria-.

On the other hand, they will be tools of educational exclusion if the prescription is in fact a substantial reduction in knowledge acquisition, so that a student who does not get the Graduate of Compulsory Education in regular classrooms could easily get it in a PDC or a PCPI even if lacking the knowledge required in ordinary classrooms. As a consequence of the research question raise, I will focus my research in the mandated curriculum that strongly conditions and frames what can be taught in classrooms, in addition to defining the educational intentions pursued by society, and more specifically in The Valencian Region. The first part of the thesis consists of a theoretical study of school failure from the point of view of educational exclusion and the two programs displayed. In the second part, I present the design and development of my field work, whose purpose is to establish comparisons between the objectives, content, evaluation criteria and basic skills of the second year of both 2º PDC and 2º PCPI, in contrast to that of the final year of Compulsory School. I have gathered and analysed the 4th year minimum core curriculum and the same course defined by the consensus of experts in the fields of the two main subject areas, Mathematics and Castilian, in order to establish whether the various curricular elements can be considered similar. Moreover, I have turned to the Delphi technique, convinced that the coincidence of several opinions that have provided the experts reach a degree of minimum consensus which can be considered as “shared intersubjectivity”.

After the presentation and debate of the data, I have come to the general conclusion that student in these two programs with the exception of the curriculum of the second year of PDC, in comparison to the core curriculum, cannot enjoy the basic right to education, since the legislation draws up a mandated curriculum that lacks basic learning. I have finally established some recommendations for improvements, most notably the importance of drawing up a core curriculum consensus by the entire education community to ensure all students the education right to reach at least the essential and indispensable learning.