About us
Virolai is a semiprivate school with three lines from P1 until baccalaureate, laic, inclusive open, and respectful with different ideas of life, which ponders, learns, and continuously improves to answer the new challenges that arise. Moreover, it has as its aim greatness education, meaning, to offer the best education for students and their families.
With a powerful educational project based on:
Our mission:
“Growing Together” focuses on the importance of a narrow relationship between the families and the school to assume together the compromise of helping the students in their learning process and personal growth.
Our values:
Which among others, includes:
- Effort and satisfaction, key elements for personal growth.
- Self-awareness of aptitudes and interests, which constitute each learner’s singularity, allow them to establish their own personal growth plan.
- Experiential and meaningful learning in real projects in which the student is the true protagonist of their learning.
- Education in values: we want our students to be honest, open-minded to the world, supportive, good citizens, with a critical mind, and capable of managing their lives and committing themselves to live in a better society.
- Affection and respect in human relations within our educational community.
The innovative spirit and the commitment to continuous improvement make Virolai’s Educational Project a living project, which evolves and adapts to the reality of every moment and its main objective is to educate people with inner strength, solid competencies, and strongly rooted values, so they are able to face the challenges of the future successfully.
Bief Background:
The pedagogue Josep Maria Ballarin and his wife and teacher Montserrat Andreu funded School Virolai in 1960, at a time of impoverishment of the national education system. Both chose a pedagogical renewal, which includes coeducation and bilingual education. This new educational approach was strongly based on close collaboration with families, who felt and experienced the school as their own, to the point that the strong desire to continue at the school turned what should have been a small kindergarten school into a school up to the baccalaureate.
The new educative proposal also focuses on the individuality of each pupil to acquire the maximum potential, in which tutoring is the main educational pillar to help the students grow, their ethical principles, and their responsibility to give back to society what they have received. All of this is lived in an affectionate atmosphere among the whole educational community.
Over more than 60 years of history, many events have shaped Virolai’s collective memory: the first school to hold a ski course in La Molina in 1964, the Spring Festivals, the Floral Games, the Sports Festivals, The Living Nativity Scene, the celebration of traditional festivals, the theatrical performances by parents, teaching staff and pupils, the 25th and 50th-anniversary celebrations. And many awards and acknowledgments for the educational and teaching work of our school.
Activities that continue and develop with the school with: the annual Escola Oberta (open school) days, The Arbol festivals, school retreats, exchanges, and international programs, the theatre, the sport, Turon’s magazine, our website, the solidarity projects, and a thousand and one activities which make Virolai a living school. Since its origins, the school has never stopped innovating or working to shape free, competent citizens who are committed to building a better world.
