Illa exculpates Niubó from the PISA fiasco: "We have already relieved the general secretary of Education"

BarcelonaEducation is immersed in a permanent crisis. After months of teachers' strikes and collecting poor student results, the PISA test fiasco has been added to it. In this context, and after being requested by various parliamentary forces, the President of the Generalitat appeared in Parliament to provide explanations. However, Salvador Illa defended the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, and absolved her of all responsibility. "We have already made effective the replacement of the Secretary General of Education," the socialist leader justified.

Illa justified that, after the Government made public the PISA test fiasco, 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.

The head of the Government, however, 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, excused himself by comparing the poor results obtained in 2025—even though they are not valid—with the worsening of the rest of the State and almost all OECD countries. Furthermore, Illa attributed it to a global trend and largely blamed it 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 classes. "Fewer networks and screens, and more literature and more Joanot Martorell," said the president of the Generalitat.

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

The opposition demands the resignation of Niubó

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" through the manipulation of the sample.

For Sales, Niubó is "the worst Minister of Education in history," but she also singled out the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, who "makes every crisis he touches worse," and 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, more than half of the first hundred of which have been distributed in municipalities governed by the PSC.

From the investiture partners, the deputy spokesperson for ERC in Parliament, Jordi Albert, 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% student exclusion threshold has been known for 23 years and that it is "quite suspicious that the two people responsible for PISA were dismissed in September-October 2025". "It would prove that you were aware of this error long before," he retorted.

On the Spanish nationalist right flank, 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". "Are you not ashamed?" he asked him, and attributed the educational "failure" to the conception of the model and the lack of "gradualism" in 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 causing the collapse of the education system.