Ten years later, what should education enable?
This September marks ten years since the launch of the Escola Nova 21 program, a three-year alliance that mobilized half a thousand public and charter schools to update the educational system. The anniversary coincides with the concern over the PISA 2025 results and leads us to revisit a fundamental question: how can education better empower children and young people to understand today's world, develop within it, and contribute to transforming it?
Between 2015 and 2025, the competencies measured by PISA have declined, both in Catalonia and Spain as well as across the OECD as a whole. It is a multicausal phenomenon. It involves COVID, digital transformation, and more recently AI—capable of solving exercises, drafting or summarizing texts, or answering exams—along with inequality and diversity, which require more resources.
Escola Nova 21 was born in 2016, focusing on the educational purpose, taking UNESCO's Education 2030 as a reference: to guarantee all children and adolescents empowering learning for today's world, with high expectations and leaving no one behind. This implies linking effort, perseverance, and rigor to meaningful learning. In a context where AI solves more and more tasks, it is even more important to understand why one learns and to see that the effort is worth it.
For this reason, inquiry-based learning starts from questions, problems, and challenges that give meaning to what is learned. The goal is to equip all students with competencies—knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values—to build their life project and face current challenges. It is also what PISA measures: to what extent they know how to mobilize what they learn to understand, reason, and solve situations.
In this vein, Escola Nova 21 started from the good work that many schools and institutes were already doing, valuing curricular practices and contrasting them with research and the recommendations of UNESCO and the OECD. And, above all, trusting teachers and centers: involving them, training them, and promoting well-founded collaborative learning. It was emphasized that achieving deep learning requires overcoming passive reception and short-term reproduction to build and mobilize knowledge, integrating memorization, practice, and automation. PISA 2025 points to growing difficulties in maintaining attention on demanding tasks: reading long texts, integrating and evaluating information, or reflecting. In a digital environment, students—like many adults—have more difficulty focusing, while curiosity, motivation, and perseverance diminish.
The aim of Escola Nova 21 was not to transform the system in three years, but to change the perspective on purpose and learning, empower teachers, improve teaching practice, and validate scalable change processes, with reference centers showing how to move forward. Perhaps the mobilization created the mirage of a rapid and irreversible change, an expectation guided by desire but which was not what we were proposing.
The program was conceived as a collaborative laboratory to change public policy: to prototype, pilot, evaluate, and, if it worked, scale up. Thirty representative centers followed a monitored change process, with teacher training, to learn how to update a center and improve its practices. In parallel, nearly 500 centers in 60 territorial networks with the support of the local world shared experiences and reviewed their projects with the Educational Change Rubric, developed with the department and the Inspectorate. While that push did not have continuity in a systemic public action of comparable ambition, no other initiative in recent decades has addressed the updating of the entire educational system with such scale and intensity.
Ten years later, it is still difficult to turn learning and evidence into a sustained policy beyond electoral cycles. It is necessary to invest in teaching quality: selection, training, professional development, and organization. Competitive examinations—the current selection system—do not allow for the assessment of professional competencies, and provision based on seniority hinders the formation of teams consistent with each school's project. Canceling the staff decree without an alternative erodes this capacity. It is also necessary to extend competency-based assessment—such as PISA—which is still a minority, and direct more resources where they are a priority.
In 2020, entities and leaders called, unsuccessfully, for a transversal agreement for a ten-year educational system update plan, with 2030 as the horizon. Estonia, with strategies up to 2035, and Finland, with a 2040 vision, have done so, betting on continuity. Updating the system requires a long-term outlook, capable of adapting to social, technological, and educational changes without getting trapped in electoral cycles.
We must ask ourselves again what the purpose of education should be today and make the system consistent with it, overcoming logic designed for a society that no longer exists. And do it, as Ferrer i Guàrdia said, by putting the students' interests ahead of any other. Ten years after Escola Nova 21, with Covid, social change, and AI in the mix, it is necessary to redefine how education can better empower children and young people to understand today's world, develop within it, and contribute to transforming it, and orient the entire system towards this by reinforcing the teachers and centers that are already advancing in this direction. Because, in education, there is no favorable wind for those who do not know which port they are heading to.
