RESUMO
The possible influence of the family on school retardation was evaluated in the Cartuja quarter in Granada for the academic term 1988-89. The study was performed on 258 schoolchildren of the 7th and 8th primary courses in the four public schools from the quarter. Data were collected with a questionnaire including the following variables: school retardation, sex, number of siblings, ordinal number among siblings, educational level of the parents, and work of the mother outside the household. To evaluate family function the APGAR questionnaire was used. A remarkably high (45.7%) school retardation was found, higher than that in the rest of Spain. School retardation cannot be related with the family dysfunction detected by the familial APGAR. It was related, rather, with the child's sex, the educational level of the mother, the number of siblings and the ordinal place of the child among them.