The school year has started relatively calmly in nursery and primary schools (no strikes and, in the end, sufficient activity leaders in most cases) and the same thing is expected to happen from Wednesday in secondary schools, which also start the year earlier than usual. Complaints focus on two issues: the heat in schools, which are poorly conditioned for high temperatures; and unfinished building works, which affect various schools.

Heads of 5,000 Catalan schools already know how they ought to respond to the ruling demanding 25% of classes be taught in Spanish. The Department of Education has sent them instructions via e-mail to inform them on how to enforce the decree passed on Monday in which the Government explicitly rejects the application of percentages in the use of languages in schools. This email to directors has a double goal: on the one hand, to reassure teachers and management teams and to try to protect them legally, since the Government would be responsible for the legality of every school's linguistic projects; on the other, to convince the Catalan High Court that it is not disobeying the ruling, but that the Catalan Government – albeit disregarding percentages – wishes to regulate the use of languages.

Under 48 hours before a new day of industrial action in state schools, head teachers from 300 schools have signed a letter addressed to Catalan Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, to which ARA has had access, in which they warn that the situation in schools is "unsustainable": "There is a real risk that the whole public education system will collapse and the functioning of state schools with minimum quality standards will no longer be guaranteed". The statement asks the minister for "measures not words" after "repeated" demands made by schools to the Department.

Catalan Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray has promised headteachers' representatives instructions on how to act before the Catalan High Court sentence fording the Generalitat to ensure 25% of classes are taught in Spanish across Catalonia. In a meeting led by president Pere Aragonès, the Government has listened to headteachers' requests. "We have asked for specific instructions to know how we should enforce the order and they have told us they will send them to us soon," ARA was told by one of the headteachers who attended the meeting.

Catalonia's High Court has ordered the forced execution of its own ruling forcing schools across Catalonia to teach at least 25% of classes in Spanish. The judges compel Catalan Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray to "dictate instructions and establish necessary checks" so that in a fortnight "all students are effectively and immediately taught" 25% of classes in Spanish. The judges consider that in order to guarantee "the normal classroom use" of both languages, students have to teach Spanish "and another core subject" in this language.

More strikes in schools. Teachers' unions warned that the end of the school year would not be peaceful if the Catalan Department of Education did not reverse the cuts for the next year and, after negotiations were broken off, they have announced industrial action in May and June. On May 25 and June 9 teachers will strike all day and on May 17 and June 2 they will strike for two hours, from 8.00 am to 10.00 am. Unions are calling protests to denounce the Education Department's policies, which among other measures has brought forward the start of next school year. The unions are now demanding above all that the Department to reduce number of teaching hours in primary schools (as the Government had proposed) but also in secondary schools as of next year (which the department says is technically impossible).

The 103 public nursery schools in Barcelona have decided not to follow the new school calendar announced by the Generalitat and start next academic year on September 12, and not on September 5 as the rest of Catalonia will do. ARA has learnt this is the proposal that Barcelona City Council has put forward to the nursery schools teachers unions, after they joined the strike days in March, sparked by changes to the school calendar but which also demanded better working conditions. The City Council is confident it will reach an agreement with CCOO, UGT, CSIF and CGT, as it was the unions themselves who asked for a one-year moratorium to the changes in the school year.

There is no more margin to seek an agreement. The mess between unions and the Department of Education has materialized with the resolution published this Tuesday at noon on schools' internal portal, informing them of the staff they will have next year. This document does not include the 1,463 extra teachers the Department had promised as a last minute gesture, in exchange for accepting one of the unions' main demands, a reduction in the number of teaching hours for primary and secondary school teachers. But the unions demanded that this measure also be applied in secondary schools from September onwards, a point that the Department claims is neither economically nor technically feasible and proposed a delay until the following academic year, in 2023-24. The unions rejected this and, in the end, staff numbers will be more or less the same as this year, or even lower, if the State does not renew covid funds which allow to pay the thousand of substitute teachers schools had throughout the pandemic. The Department expects a hectic end of the school year.

In the middle of a judicial offensive against Catalan in education, Catalonia's High Court has agreed with the Assembly for a Bilingual School, which last June sued the Catalan government over its instructions for holding university entrance exams, because they only asked invigilators to distribute exam papers in Catalan, and only when students requested it handing out a copy in Catalan. Thus, Catalonia's High Court has declared the instructions null and void. According to the judges, doing this is contrary to the Constitution because it violates the right of students not to be discriminated against (Article 14 of the Constitution) and the right to education (Article 27).

Catalan Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray has sent a letter to Catalonia's High Court to inform it of how he plans to implement the sentence that forces 25% of classes in primary and secondary schools be in Spanish, given that this Friday was the last day to execute the ruling. In his letter, Cambray points out the measures that have been taken during these months to convince the Catalan High Court the ruling (which is already final and has cannot be appealed) is being complied with. First of all, Cambray adduces the agreement announced yesterday by ERC, PSC, JxCat and En Comú Podem in Parliament to modify the linguistic policy law and "update the guarantee of achievement of linguistic competence in accordance with the curriculum's new skill-based approach and the application of the instruments of control, assessment and improvement of the educational system" .

The linguistic model in education has achieved an almost unprecedented agreement in Catalonia's Parliament, only one day before the deadline given by law to execute the High Court ruling establishing 25% of classes had to be in Spanish. After two months of discreet work, the ERC-JxCat coalition government, alongside En Comú Podem and PSC, have registered a bill to modify some articles of the law of linguistic policy, passed in 1998, which as a framework law directly affects Catalonia's 2009 Education Law. The great change is that the new wording includes for the first time that Catalan students have the right to be taught the official languages "and in the official languages", admitting that Spanish, as an official language in Catalonia, is also a language which can be used in the classroom, although it avoids stating that it should ever be the main language. The text, however, does not determine what percentage of hours have to be taught in each language, as Catalonia's High Court has done, but speaks of an "adequate presence" of the two languages that will be decided according to the school.

Four months after the Catalan High Court ruling that 25% of classes had to be taught in Spanish became final, the first details of the Government's response have arrived. Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray has announced that the Government is preparing a new decree to modify Catalonia's Education Law (CEL) to "reaffirm the Catalan school model". Cambray has said that for the moment schools "do not have to modify their linguistic projects", that is to say, they do not have to teach 25% of classes in Spanish, because what the Catalan Government wants to do is "to answer the court" with a new normative framework that is not based on percentages. "We measure learning, not percentages, and the Catalan education system gives the absolute guarantee that by the last year of compulsory education students will have full competence in Catalan and Spanish," said Cambray.

The Education Department has backed down on some of the changes it was proposing in primary and secondary education curricula. After listening to the proposals by the educational community, the Department has finally presented the final proposal and, among the most important new features, the new bottom grade will no longer be renamed "in process of achievement", as had been proposed in the draft, but will remain "not achieved". In addition, "autonomous management", where schools can freely decide what subjects to teach, have been cut from 6 to 4.

Leaflets distributed at the Department of Education's stand at the Education Salon have caused a stir: among the information that students could consult there was an outline of what the future baccalaureate will be like. This would seem perfectly normal were it not for the fact that this is precisely the information schools have been requesting for over a month in order to make contributions and also advise students, especially those in their last year of compulsory education, on what future path to follow. Indignation among teachers was evident on social media. They consider that, once again, the Department will apply changes without consulting them. Precisely, the Department of Education's ways are one of the reasons that pushed many teachers to take part of the five-day strike.

At the beginning of the second of industrial action planned in schools, Catalan Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray has appeared to announce that schools will be allowed to postpone changes to the curriculum across primary and secondary school. The Catalan Government will pass the decrees but schools will be able to decide whether to apply the changes in September 2021, or wait until next year.

Today was the first of the five days of industrial action called by education unions in this month of March. Unions called for mass participation to protest against the Education Department's policies and to demand improvements to the sector. At the moment, union USTEC claims that participation has been massive and exceeded expectations. The unions estimate that around 60% of school teachers have taken part in the strike, whereas Aspepc, a secondary school teachers' union, believes it is 75%. The Education Department, however, says that only 31.3% of state school teachers struck, according to data reported by 87.5% of school. At chartered schools, only 8.7% of teachers went on strike, according to data reported by 69.7% of schools. The unions claim more workers would have gone on strike had it not been for "abusive" minimum services requirements, but even so they claim the demonstration is "historical" and the strike "very massive".

In an almost unprecedented gesture of unity, all 200 public schools in Barcelona have sent a joint letter to Education minister Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, in which they convey their "discomfort over communication and resource management". This would seem to indicate that the first of the five days of strikes called in school will have a massive take-up. In addition, schools have started to inform families that they will strike on Tuesday 15th.

From being the the Department of Education's favourite to having no space to teach. Three years ago, the Department of Education announced that it would double the number of all-through schools in Catalonia, a formula that brings together infant, primary and secondary education – as many chartered schools do – with the aim of trying to reduce segregation and absenteeism in secondary education. Most of the new centers were created by adding the first year of secondary education to a primary school, a measure that, as well as the pedagogical reasons, was also "of budgetary efficiency", since it is cheaper to have more groups in a school that already exists than to build one from scratch. Despite the fact that the Catalan Education minister at the time, Josep Bargalló, guaranteed that no prefabricated modules would be used, three years later secondary school students in some centres continue to be housed in temporary modules in the palyground.

The discomfort of the educational community with the department has escalated rapidly since the announcement last week of the changes in the school calendar. The decision that the next school year will start a week earlier and with an intensive school day throughout September without any previous debate has caused the teachers' unions to explode, and this Thursday they have occupied the headquarters of the Department of Education and threaten to stay until the consellerjosep Gonzalez-Cambray, receives them and commits to reverse the changes. Shouting "Cambray, resign", the unions criticize "the opacity" of the Govern and, beyond the discrepancies with the measure, they are annoyed by how and when the measure has been announced, skipping the participation bodies such as Catalonia's School Council.

Only five of the 16 schools in Catalonia that used to separate students by sex will remain. The Institució Familiar d'Educació group, which manages ten schools in Catalonia, has announced that its secondary school groups will go co-ed as of next year. The measure, advanced by Diari de Girona, affects the centers of La Farga in Sant Cugat del Vallès (until now only for boys), La Vall (until now only for girls), Les Alzines (for girls) and Bell-lloc del Pla (for boys) in Girona and Institució Tarragona (formed by schools Aura, for girls, and Turó, for boys), and adds to what had already been done by schools in Igualada (Montclar and Mistral) and Lleida (Terraferma and Arabell). In total, there will remain five schools in Catalonia that will separate boys and girls, and they are the ones most closely linked to Opus Dei: Xaloc and Pineda, in L'Hospitalet; Viaró, in Sant Cugat; Camp Joliu, in L'Arboç, and Canigó, in Barcelona