Illa exonerates Niubó from the PISA fiasco: "We have already relieved the Secretary General of Education"

BarcelonaEducation is immersed in a permanent crisis. After months of teacher strikes and collecting poor results from students, the PISA test fiasco has been added to it. In this context, and after several parliamentary forces requested it, the President of the Generalitat appeared before Parliament to give explanations, but he completely exonerated the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, and hid behind the fact that he had already dismissed the department's number two. "The replacement of the Secretary General of Education has been executed," the socialist leader justified.

Illa recalled that, after the Government made the PISA test fiasco public, Niubó had already announced the dismissal of the Secretary General of Education, Teresa Sambola, and the opening of three disciplinary proceedings, two of which were "very serious," against two civil servants and a high-ranking official. And, in fact, the President of the Generalitat attributes it to "errors of interpretation and supervision" in the execution of these tests and, above all, to "errors in the transmission of information" from the civil servants who detected it to the Minister of Education or the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, who replaced Niubó when she was on leave.

The head of the Government, however, has said that the Catalan executive does not "limit" itself to pointing out "individual responsibilities" and, therefore, has promised to carry out measures to improve the execution system of the PISA tests. In this sense, Illa has assured that his administration "will evaluate what went wrong so that it does not happen again and will create an evaluation commission on alert and traceability circuits." He also stated that he intends to strengthen the Agency for Evaluation and Prospective of Education (APE).

The President of the Generalitat, who has assured that he does not want to downplay the "importance" of the PISA test blunder, has excused himself by comparing the poor results obtained in 2025 —even though they are not valid— with those of the worsening in the rest of the State and almost all OECD countries. Furthermore, Illa has attributed it to a global trend and has blamed it in large part on the increase in the use of new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, among students and in classrooms. "The world has changed and educational centers have changed," he noted.

For this reason, Illa has assured that the Government will be "the first autonomous community that will have a digital well-being model" which, among other things, provides for the creation of a legal age for the use of artificial intelligence at fourteen years old, or the return of textbooks to classrooms. "Less social media and screens, and more literature and more Joanot Martorell," said the president of the Generalitat.

As usual, the head of the Government has again blamed his predecessors and criticized them for the fact that during the Process "education did not occupy a central role." "We did not find education as we would have liked," insisted Illa. And, on the other hand, he has claimed that his executive is making "unprecedented efforts" to strengthen Catalan education, and has recalled that it has increased the education budget by 24% compared to 2023.

The opposition demands Niubó's resignation

The president of the main opposition group, Junts member Mònica Sales, has responded harshly to Illa's intervention. In her view, the Government "cares little about education" and she asked the president "what more must the minister do" for him "to dismiss her". According to Sales, "every new failure of the minister is a failure" of the president who, moreover, "either knew and hid it or someone in his government hid it from him". The crux of the matter, however, is the suspicion held by Junts that the Catalan executive "was afraid of the real results or wanted to pretend that everything was going well with Minister Niubó" by manipulating the sample.

For Sales, Niubó is "the worst Minister of Education in history," but she also pointed to the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, who "makes every crisis he touches worse," and to the entire Government for the serious crisis dragged on for more than a year. "To hell with the teachers" is the message she believes Illa conveys regarding the sector's crisis and the solutions he provides, such as air conditioning in schools, of which more than half of the first hundred have been distributed in municipalities governed by the PSC.

From the investiture partners, the deputy spokesperson for ERC in Parliament, Jordi Albert, has warned that the Government "has destroyed the prestige of an entire country" and that "it is incomprehensible that it could not have been detected sooner". Lamenting "the absolute chaos", he pointed out that the 5% threshold for student exclusion has been known for 23 years and that it is "quite suspicious that the two officials responsible for PISA were dismissed in September-October 2025". "It would prove that you were aware of this error much earlier," he stressed.

On the flank of the Spanish nationalist right, the leader of the Catalan PP, Alejandro Fernández, asserted that "while Illa was organizing eclipses, the education system was becoming the laughing stock of all Europe". "Aren't you ashamed?" he asked him, and attributed the educational "failure" to the conception of the model and the lack of "gradualism" regarding languages in the classrooms. For his part, the leader of Vox, Ignacio Garriga, argued that "the manipulation of the sample was to hide the failure of the Catalan school model" and criticized the Government's response, based on "corruption and lies". In his view, "what Catalonia needs is to change the model" and he emphasized the fact that "the overrepresentation of immigrants" is the cause of the collapse of the education system.