"Don't watch us, join us". This is the message on the banner at what can be considered the entrance to the encampment that has been set up since this Tuesday in Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona to demand decent housing. By mid-afternoon, the banner made more sense than ever: there were almost more onlookers around the tents watching and taking photos than people participating in the mobilization. But as the sun began to set, the scene changed, and by around nine in the evening, there were about 300 people – on Tuesday there were a hundred – who claim they will spend the night there. The vast majority are not yet thirty, and rather than the 15-M movement from fifteen years ago, they take as a reference the hundreds of people who have been camping in Madrid's Plaza del Sol since this weekend.

The protest that erupted with the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal in Madrid, and which transformed into a large encampment at Puerta del Sol on Saturday, has reached Barcelona. This Tuesday, a few hours after the Spanish government approved the new housing decree laws in the council of ministers, but without yet having the support of its partners, about a hundred people have camped out in Plaça Catalunya with the intention of spending the night there. "The encampment will continue, whether the decree is approved or not," they asserted in a statement on social media, through which they issued the call for this Tuesday night, which already has around twenty tents. After ten o'clock at night, the people who had gathered there were encouraging each other to spend the night among shouts of "We are staying, we are staying!"

"The strength of educational systems depends on that of their teachers [...] and it is increasingly difficult to attract, train and retain high-quality teachers". With this premise, the OECD has focused its 2026 report on the state of education —the Education at a Glance— on the shortage of teachers and the measures that can be taken to address it. Among the many data analyzed by the international body is the temporary nature of teachers' contracts, a variable in which Spain clearly comes off poorly. According to the report, the Spanish state is the fifth OECD country with the highest percentage of high school teachers without a permanent contract.

"This project is not against private VET; on the contrary, it will strengthen the quality of private centers". With this statement, the Minister of Education, Milagros Tolón, has presented the draft decree with which the Spanish government wants to put an end to the privatepop-up businesses that have found a business path in the world of vocational training (VET). With the new decree, presented this Monday and which is expected to be approved before the end of the year, Pedro Sánchez's executive seeks to place specific limits and requirements on this type of private training, which in the last decade has grown exponentially, especially in the online modality. For example, in Catalonia, in the 2024-2025 academic year, there were already twice as many students taking a VET degree in the private sector as in the state-subsidized sector.

Knowing how to read, reading to learn, and a love for reading. These are the three pillars on which, according to the Department of Education, the school reading plan (PLEC) must be based. Or, in other words, the plan that sets the didactic and organizational line that a school or institute must follow to ensure that students end up being good readers. At the moment, this organizational document is only a recommendation, and only about 700 of the little more than 2,500 public educational centers have a reading plan that meets the requirements set by the Generalitat. However, among the measures to reinforce learning announced by Minister Esther Niubó this week is, precisely, making the PLEC mandatory. This implies that, for the coming academic year, more than 1,800 public schools and institutes will have to create their reading plan from scratch or modify it to comply with this directive.

The infinity of data analyzed by the PISA report and the many ways of analyzing them continue to cause a stir. After researchers from EsadecPol –the center for economic policies at Esade– and Innovamat Research Lab warned in a study on Wednesday that there was an error in the PISA report which meant that the claim that wealthy students had lost more level than vulnerable ones was false, the OECD has responded. In a written response provided to the media, the OECD –the organization that conducts the PISA tests around the world– downplays the matter: it points out that the difference between the conclusion of its report and that of the Spanish researchers "reflects a methodological choice and not a methodological error." Despite admitting that they have not yet "had the opportunity to review the research in detail," they do defend that "the conclusions of the PISA volume remain valid and consistent."

Back to basics. Back to basics. This is the foundation of the learning reinforcement measures presented this Thursday by the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó. These measures will be focused on improving how the two main pillars of learning are taught: language and reading comprehension, and mathematics. Among the guidelines, a significant change has been announced: next year there will once again be mandatory readings in baccalaureate, and all schools and high schools will be required to have a school reading plan.

"Until recently, Catalonia had 27 methods for collecting medical data". With this figure, the president of the Biological Sciences Section of the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC), Jaume Reventós, has attempted to show one of the risks we face when using artificial intelligence (AI) in current and future medicine. He did so in a debate organized by the IEC itself and ARA, in which the president of the Science and Technology Section of the IEC, Alícia Casals, also participated, and which was moderated by the head of the Society section of ARA, Gemma Garrido Granger.

A surprising plot twist in the PISA test results. Researchers from EsadecPol –Esade's center for economic policies– and Innovamat Research Lab have found an error in the analysis of the OECD's educational tests. The error implies that the claim that wealthier students had lost more level than vulnerable ones would be false. According to these researchers, the drop in level of students with a high socioeconomic status, which the OECD itself qualified as a "new phenomenon" and a "surprise", is due to a change in the way students are classified and not a drop in points in languages and mathematics. For the moment, the OECD has not commented on this study.

Slammed door by Ustec to the country debate to improve education in Catalonia commissioned by President Salvador Illa. In a press conference, the majority union in the education sector explained this Tuesday that it does not accept "the framework proposed by the Government" because it "intends to derive exclusively" the debate through the Education Council of Catalonia. The coordinator of union action, Andreu Mumbrú, has said that they understand the Government's proposal as "a will to deactivate mobilization and dilute the voice of professionals in the centers". "We wonder if public education needs yet another debate", he reproached.

It had only been two days since Pau, Jofre, and Nil had started classes when news resonated around the world: "Anthropic engineer resigns for fear of AI". While the head of alignment science at this company claimed that this technology "could kill us all by the end of this decade", the three of them were entering the Barcelona School of Informatics to face their second day as students of the artificial intelligence degree at the UPC.

This Friday, the Spanish government was supposed to obtain the approval of the autonomous communities to lay the foundations for an inclusive school model for the entire State. A kind of roadmap to ensure that, as is already being attempted in Catalonia, ordinary schools also become the reference space for students with disabilities. Although the plan had received the green light from the Spanish School Council, when it reached the Education sector conference, the communities governed by the PP and Vox (11 out of 17) and the Canary Islands shot it down. "They came with a predetermined position and a convergent strategy not to accept this challenge," criticized the Secretary of State for Education, Abelardo de la Rosa, when he left the meeting. "It was an ideological stance," insisted De la Rosa, and recalled that the "conceptual framework" of the plan that "intended to help" in the inclusion of the million and a half students with learning difficulties in Spain had been rejected.

"We are the first to open this path, we trust that this will serve the rest of the system." With these words, the rector of the University of Barcelona (UB), Joan Guàrdia, has announced one of the institution's major bets: taking the leap to China. The UB will be the first Catalan university to open a campus in China, and it will do so hand-in-hand with the Harbin Institute of Technology, a leading center in technology and engineering, considered one of the nine best universities in the country, according to the Chinese government.

Since 2024, Joan Manuel del Pozo has been the president of the Education Council, the body that will have to lead the educational debate announced by the president of the Generalitat. A doctor of philosophy, Del Pozo was also Minister of Education and Universities in 2006, during the government of Pasqual Maragall.

One in every five 15-year-old Spanish adolescents has repeated a school year. This is shown by the PISA report data analyzed by EsadeEcPol and Save the Children in a study made public this Wednesday. According to the analysis of the OECD educational tests, 22% of students in the country have repeated at some point in their trajectory before reaching 4th year of ESO. The Spanish proportion is almost ten points above the European average (12.9%) and is directly double the average of the OECD countries as a whole (9.8%). According to the EsadeEcPol analysis, Spain is the third country in the OECD where grade repetition is most common.

In 2015, the iPhone 6s hit the market, the first one to have the live photo option –taking a short video of the moment so you can choose the frame that interests you–. Instagram had its definitive boom, reaching 400 million monthly users, still without stories or reels. There were five years left until TikTok revolutionized social media with short videos. Among Spanish adolescents, books like The Hunger Games saga, After, or The Fault in Our Stars were triumphs. In the PISA tests, Spain scored 496 points in reading comprehension, placing itself ahead of the European average (487) and the OECD average (493).

That all public schools and high schools be prepared for heat and cold within five years. This was the promise made this Monday by the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, in his mid-term conference. The measure will involve an investment of up to 2.5 billion euros —approximately one million for each center— which is expected to be mobilized between this school year and the 2030-2031 academic year (by which time the current legislature will have ended at least three years prior). In this way, the Government expects that in five years all public educational centers will be climate-controlled. Conversely, charter and private schools are not included in the so-called Climate Update Plan. Neither are the schools and high schools of Barcelona, which are already being climate-controlled under the Barcelona Education Consortium's plan.

Tue Halgreen is a senior analyst at the OECD and responsible for the coordination of the PISA report. He speaks to the newspaper ARA following a generalized drop in results, the fact that Spain has obtained the worst score in its history, and that Catalonia has been left out of the international report for excluding more students than permitted from the exams.

It is one of the main concerns of families, teachers, and professionals: that students use artificial intelligence (AI) to study – or to have to do less and get good grades easily –. It is also one of the novelties of the PISA report, which has analyzed country by country what use students make of this technology and how it impacts their academic performance. However, analyzing the results, it cannot be concluded that there is a clear relationship between using AI and achieving – or not – new knowledge.

The PISA report released this Tuesday by the OECD shows a significant change in trend in Spain. Beyond reaching the worst level in history, and unlike what happened with the 2022 edition, the Spanish students who have worsened the most are those with a higher socioeconomic level. Specifically, in reading comprehension, the wealthiest students have lost 33 points, double that of the most vulnerable students (-15). The same happens with mathematics: students with a better socioeconomic situation lose 24 points, while those of lower social status lose 10. In other words, regarding reading, the richest students have lost a year and a half of knowledge in Spain, while their poorer peers have regressed less than a year. The difference is even more abysmal in sciences: the wealthiest students lose triple the points than the most disadvantaged ones.