This Report derives from a doctoral thesis that studies critical knowledge of intercultural education in schools with ethnic gypsies through the experiences of intercultural female mediators. The Report starts with the following question:  does the organisational and academic culture of multicultural schools permits multicultural and multi professional teams to collaborate inside and outside of schools from the point of view of different professional fields and projects for educational inclusion?.

The long history of failure in schooling and educational results of ethnic gypsy students has always been an unsolved problem. The gypsy community in Spain has had the right to schooling for the last past 25 years, but since then, their general outcomes have been very poor (Salinas 2009). The high percentage of drop outs and failures among ethnic gipsy students has prompted the European Council, celebrated in Lisbon, to include among its strategic objectives to decrease ethnic gypsy student’s drop out rate to 10% before the age of 18 years old; lower the percentage of poor literacy skills and to reach an 85% of ethnic gypsy students with a secondary school diploma (which in Spain’s educational system means to achieve Bachillerato or Grado Medio [trade school] diploma).

Professor Dubet (2006) states that although the right to schooling is guaranteed, there are a number of circumstances that segregate ethnic gypsy students in homogenised and poor contexts: ghettos, poverty, school marks, competitivity, teachers’ pupil orientation, educational diagnosis and academic discrimination. The right to schooling does not guarantee opportunities to those who cannot follow standard school rhythm and requirements. However, each student should have the right to acquire a common culture and not only the equality of opportunities, which permit the better students to excel.

Life history of this intercultural mediator shows us that there is a factual separation between school organizational culture and the necessities of ethnic gypsy students. The Mediator narrates her work at schools and how it has been an important factor in ethnic gypsy schooling, notwithstanding the social and political circumstances of her professional history. The Mediator proposes new challenges for intercultural mediation with gypsy communities, which would overcome the existing differences between educational and social tasks. The maturity acquired by school social mediation in gypsy communities has overshadowed the function of social mediation outside of schools, which was the normal practice, colloquially known as correveidile.  At the moment, intercultural mediation has other challenges such as bring families closer to educational institutions and collaborate in the activity of creating democratic school contexts which would lead to academic success of young ethnic gypsies, building social bridges to inclusion and to implicate the whole community.

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