BarcelonaEducation is immersed in a permanent crisis. After months of teacher strikes and collecting poor student results, it has been joined by the PISA test fiasco. In this context, and after being requested by various parliamentary forces, the President of the Generalitat appeared in Parliament to provide explanations, but he completely exonerated the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, and took refuge in 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. Nevertheless, all the opposition parliamentary groups have demanded Niubó's resignation.
Illa recalled that, after the Government made the PISA failure 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 one senior 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" by the civil servants who detected it up to the Minister of Education or the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, who replaced Niubó while she was on leave. "I have full confidence in the minister and I believe that a change of names would not contribute anything. Therefore, we will not do it," insisted Illa.
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 move forward with measures to improve the execution system of the PISA tests. In this sense, Illa 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 "fiasco" of the PISA tests, 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 this to a global trend and has largely blamed it on the increased 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 Catalonia "will be the first autonomous community to have a digital well-being model," which, among other measures, provides for the creation of a legal age for the use of AI at fourteen or the return of textbooks to classes. "Fewer networks and screens, and more literature and more Joanot Martorell," said the President of the Generalitat. He also urged the rest of the parliamentary forces to reach a consensus to move forward with a plan with "five or six" measures, with clear objectives and deadlines for compliance.
As usual, the head of the Government has once again blamed his predecessors and criticized them for the fact that during the Process "education did not occupy a central role." In contrast, he has claimed that his executive is making "unprecedented efforts" to strengthen Catalan education, such as the 24% increase in the education budget compared to 2023.
The opposition demands Niubó's resignation
The president of the main opposition group, the 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 fire her". According to Sales, "every new failure of the minister is a failure" of the president. Furthermore, she believes that the president "either knew it and hid it, or someone in his government hid it from him". The crux of the matter, however, is the Junts suspicion that the Catalan executive "were afraid of the real results or wanted to make it look like 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 has also pointed to 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. Sales has also denounced that in the climate control plan from which a hundred schools will benefit, "more than half" are in municipalities of the PSC.
However, the investiture partners have also been critical. The deputy spokesperson for ERC, Jordi Albert, warned that the Government "has destroyed the prestige of an entire country" and that "it is not understood why it could not have been detected sooner". Censuring "the absolute mess", he pointed out that the 5% student exclusion threshold has been known for 23 years and that it is "quite suspicious that in September-October 2025 the two officials responsible for PISA were dismissed". "It would prove that you were aware of this error much earlier", he stated.
In turn, the leader of Comuns in the chamber, Jéssica Albiach, has lashed out against the Government's "mockery" with PISA, where "transparency failed". Furthermore, she reproached that "for more than a year they have known about the existence of this problem". She also pointed to solutions in the system and requested a calendar for the increase of the budget to 6% of the GDP, in addition to better addressing the "linguistic difficulties" of newcomers. On the other hand, from the CUP, Pilar Castillejo lamented the "concealment or political incapacity" of Niubó and commented that there are "too many students without the support they need", although she did not endorse "reopening pedagogical debates that the educational community has already held".
On the Spanish nationalist right flank, the leader of the Catalan PP, Alejandro Fernández, has asserted that "while Illa was organizing eclipses, the education system was becoming the laughing stock of all Europe." Thus, he has attributed the educational "failure" to the model and the lack of "gradualism" in languages. For his part, the leader of Vox, Ignacio Garriga, has argued that "the manipulation of the sample was to hide the failure of the Catalan school model" and has emphasized the fact that "the overrepresentation of immigrants" represents the downfall of the education system.
His pro-independence counterpart on the radical right, Sílvia Orriols, has also pointed out that "the constant trickle of newly arrived students lowers academic results so drastically that there are governments that falsify PISA results." Like Vox, she has also taken the opportunity to call for elections.
Junts, ERC, Comuns and the CUP display anti-fascist posters against Aliança before Illa's appearance
Deputies from Junts, ERC, Comuns and the CUP displayed anti-fascist posters against the far-right this Wednesday before the appearance of the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, before the plenary session of Parliament, following the initial support of Aliança Catalana for Vox against Lluís Companys.
The posters read: "The espadrille or the swastika, you choose". These parties justified the action by recalling that just two weeks ago Aliança published a message on X saying "We have passed!" following the AfD's victory in Saxony, mocking the iconic poster by Pere Català i Pic created during the Spanish Civil War, which shows an espadrille crushing a swastika. The PSC-Units deputies declined to join the protest because, in their view, "it was not the time for a staging", just before Illa gave explanations regarding the errors in the PISA tests. However, the party remarked on its "commitment to fight against hate speech and against fascism".
