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 student results, the fiasco of the PISA tests has been added to it. In this context, and after being requested by various parliamentary forces, the President of the Generalitat has appeared in Parliament to give explanations, but he has completely exonerated the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, and has shielded himself with the fact that he already dismissed the department's number two. "The replacement of the Secretary General for Education has been executed," the socialist leader justified. Nevertheless, all 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 for Education, Teresa Sambola, and the opening of three disciplinary proceedings, two of which were "very serious," against two civil servants and a 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" from the civil servants who detected it 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," Illa insisted.

The head of the Government, however, has said that the Catalan executive does not "limit itself" to pointing out "individual responsibilities" and, for this reason, has promised to move forward with 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 "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 minimum 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 carry out 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 does the minister have to do" for him "to fire her". According to Sales, "every new failure of the minister is a failure" of the president. Furthermore, she considers that the president "either knew about 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 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 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 over a year. "To hell with the teachers" is the message she believes Illa transmits 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 PSC municipalities.

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 incomprehensible that it could not have been detected earlier". Criticizing "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 the two people responsible for PISA were dismissed in September-October 2025". "It would show that you were aware of this error long before", he stated.

In turn, the leader of the Comuns in the chamber, Jéssica Albiach, lashed out at the Government's "mockery" regarding PISA, where "transparency failed". Even more, she reproached that "they have known about the existence of this problem for over a year". She also pointed to solutions within the system and requested a calendar for increasing the budget to 6% of 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 of Europe." Thus, he 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" is causing the collapse of the education system.

His independentist 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 also took the opportunity to call for elections.