In the last fifteen years there has been a very significant evolution in the school lunch grant policy in Catalonia, but this has not eliminated all access barriers. This is the main conclusion reached by the Ombudsman regarding the situation of universal access to the dining hall service in Catalan schools and high schools. Among these access barriers, the first one pointed out by the Ombudsman is the lack of dining halls in secondary education centers, which has led to the implementation of the compacted intensive school day. This situation has been denounced for years and, despite the improvements of recent years, it remains worrying: 310 of the 563 public high schools have neither a dining hall nor a canteen service, which means that their students cannot access a school lunch grant either, as denounced by the report School lunch grants within the framework of the service universalization strategy in Catalonia, by the Ombudsman herself.

It is a quarter to twelve on Thursday morning and the vast majority of shops on Carrer Pelai, Plaça Catalunya and the lower part of Passeig de Gràcia are operating at half capacity. The day after the disturbances in the centre of the capital following the general strike demonstration, many businesses remain boarded up, many with a small opening to let customers in through a glass door that in many cases has graffiti or is directly broken or punctured. "They have destroyed everything," comments an elderly couple looking at the completely cracked windows of the Apple store in Plaça Catalunya, which has not opened today. "When they set fire inside, we decided to leave," explains one of the workers who is managing the store's repair. He complains that yesterday at noon they were already working to protect the business and that "it was all for nothing".

The Department of Education officially announced this Thursday a new call for civil service examinations with 1,140 teaching positions, mostly for secondary school, to “continue with the stabilization of the staff,” as reported in a statement. Of the total positions offered, 946 correspond to the body of secondary education teachers (that is, almost 83%), 168 to the body of primary school teachers (14%), and 26 (3%) to teachers at official language schools. The specialties with the most positions will be Catalan language and literature, Spanish language and literature, and mathematics.

A step forward to ensure that all teachers in Catalonia have the C2 level of Catalan, as stipulated by the 2009 Education Act. As ARA has learned, this academic year teacher competitive examinations will finally be called – for both preschool/primary and secondary education – and, as a new development, the C2 level of Catalan will become mandatory. Although this information is still to be presented to the sectoral board with the unions scheduled for November 12th, the current forecast on the table is for the exams to be held during the month of March 2027.

When Noemí Blazquez saw that the inclusive decree was approved in Catalonia in 2017, she didn't have children yet. "I thought: how advanced we always are here in Catalonia, how good that they want to ensure there is no separation of children in special education centers, that there is no apartheid". A couple of years later she became pregnant, and living it from the inside, her perception began to change. "My son is wonderful, but the educational journey we have had to follow has been hard and you also go through a grieving process," she explains. Her son, who is now seven years old, has level 3 autism (the highest), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and epileptic episodes.

From the summer of 2027, all Bicing bicycles will be electric. This is the goal of the action plan that Barcelona City Council has underway, as reported by El País and confirmed by ARA. According to this improvement plan, the 3,000 mechanical bicycles that the Barcelona bike service still has will be gradually replaced by electric bikes during the first half of next year. On the other hand, it is also planned to add 400 spare bicycles to the fleet to improve response capacity when there are bikes in maintenance, incidents, or times of high demand. These 400 new vehicles will be available by the end of the year.

Next academic year, the stability of teaching staff at schools and institutes in Catalonia will face another jolt. Starting this Thursday, the application period opens for the state transfer contest in Catalonia. A process that takes place throughout Spain every two years and is an opportunity for teachers who are already civil servants to change schools. As ARA has learned, the Department of Education calculates that some 20,500 civil servant teachers will have to participate in this procedure. Bearing in mind that the public network has about 85,000 teachers this year, the transfer contest could cause the mobility of one in every four active teachers and professors, although in many cases there are teachers who already wish to stay in the school where they are and succeed in doing so.

Catalonia had not recorded any wolf births in the last hundred years, but it seems that this trend is beginning to change: for the second consecutive year, a pair of wolves (Canis lupus) has bred in our region. As confirmed this Wednesday by the Rural Agents, in the last few days, five pups have been born to a pair of wolves in Alt Empordà and Alta Garrotxa.

Barça coach Hansi Flick is now an Honorary Ramblista. He received the award this Monday from the Amics de la Rambla association, which also recognized art historian Judit Subirachs and the emblematic Granja Viader. “I feel happy and proud to be part of this city. Long live Barça and long live Barcelona,” said Flick in a video in English –except for a “good evening everyone” and the now traditional “Long live Barça”– and subtitled in Catalan, which was screened at the Saló de Cent of the Barcelona City Council, after apologizing for not being able to receive the award in person, which was collected by the first vice president of FC Barcelona, Rafael Yuste. The Barça vice president highlighted that Flick “has many values” but that, in particular, “he is helping to recover” in the city the values that “we are missing,” especially regarding youth. In fact, the jury highlighted the German coach's values in awarding him, as well as “for filling the Rambla de Canaletes with joy and celebration with the successes achieved”.

The rescue tasks for the Urda accident are facing their final stage. This Friday, the government of Castilla-La Mancha detailed that the work "is very advanced," but President Emiliano García-Page was clear: "We do not rule out that there may be more deaths," he admitted from Toledo. Although the toll of fatalities remains at 69 people, the number of reports for disappearances related to the accident that have not been resolved is 67. In fact, the Manchego president explained that work continues at the ground zero of the accident and lamented that there are about thirty bags "with partial remains" and that identifying them implies "enormous complexity."

Carles Feixa is a professor of social anthropology at the Department of Communication of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), specializing in the study of youth cultures.

Linda Darling-Hammond is one of the most influential researchers and education policy leaders in the United States. She was president of the American Educational Research Association and led Barack Obama's education transition team in 2008 and Joe Biden's in 2020. She has also participated directly in the educational reform that has revived California's educational results. She is visiting Barcelona for the Equitat.org Education Yearbook conference.

Teacher mobilization is cooling down. According to the consultation carried out this week by the unions USTEC, CGT, Intersindical, COS, CNT and the Educational Assembly of Catalonia (AEC), there are more teachers who do not want to go on strike again than those who are calling for a new day of work stoppages. Specifically, of the nearly 33,000 professionals who participated in the consultation—there are 96,000 in the system as a whole—16,358 have stated that they are willing to go on strike. In practical terms, this implies that fewer than two out of every ten teachers have indicated that they would like to support a new stoppage again.

This Friday, the topics that will form part of the national educational debate to improve academic results were made official. After meeting with the parliamentary groups, the president of the Education Council of Catalonia (CEC), Joan Manuel del Pozo, announced that the process will finally focus on five major issues: inclusion and non-segregation; teacher professionalism—especially initial training and throughout the career—; the co-responsibility of families; governance at the service of learning—both on a general scale and within educational centers—, and the co-responsibility of municipalities to decentralize the educational system and distribute it across the territory.

This Thursday, the new university student statute came into force, which had not been updated since 2010. Among the novelties of this state document are that all subjects must have a recovery option, that there must be a 24-hour break between exams, and that students will have the right to receive free psychological care at the university. Although the text was approved this week by the Council of Ministers, many of the guidelines were already included in the Losu, the Organic Law of the University System that was approved in 2023.

"It is an exhibition that will leave no one indifferent: it will impress first and then lead to awareness." This is explained by the director of CosmoCaixa, Valentí Farràs, accompanied by Kim Mckay, the director of the Australian Museum. But it is almost impossible to look at them. An immense great white shark stands right behind them. It is four and a half meters long and bares its teeth next to the director of the Science Museum, stealing all the attention. It does not do it alone: a dozen life-sized shark replicas have invaded the -5 floor of CosmoCaixa in one of the most complete exhibitions ever held in the world about these unfairly feared sharks. Barcelona will be the first European city to host the exhibition Sharks. Guardians of the Ocean, which has been exhibited for two years in Australia and is the result of an exhaustive three-decade investigation by experts from all over.

The Department of Education will not remove digital whiteboards from I3, I4, and I5 classrooms, as it announced it would do in June 2024. Ultimately, the Government has opted to restrict their use, but will not remove them from the classrooms of the youngest school children. The main reason is that these devices were acquired through Next Generation funds—during the term of Minister Cambray—which means that the Government currently lacks the authority to fully remove them or move them without risking the loss of guaranteed maintenance. In this way, as reported by El Periódico and confirmed by ARA, the Department of Education will eliminate "free use" of the screens in the second cycle of early childhood education and will not allow them to have an internet connection, but it will not remove them.

Three academic years ago, the Department of Education, then led by the ERC government, created Sensei, a pilot program that was intended to be the foundation for creating a training program. Over time, it was meant to eventually transform into a MIR for teachers, similar to the one for doctors. The pilot was launched with a budget of eleven million euros that came from European funds. With this investment, 250 spots were offered over three academic years to train novice teachers. However, these funds only covered the Sensei program for three years, and therefore, last school year was the last one in which the Catalan education system had the pilot program for this long-awaited educational MIR. Now, to replace it, the Department of Education has launched a new training program that will be stable –unlike Sensei–, but which will have half the number of spots and will not have its own budget, but rather will be integrated into the investment that the Government makes in the teaching staff.

"First of all, let it be clear: we are in favor of inclusive education, but under these conditions it is impossible." This is explained by Martina, a 2nd-grade primary school teacher at a public school in the province of Barcelona. They have agreed to let ARA spend a day with them to see how inclusive school works from the inside. Without filters. However, they request anonymity. That is why all the names in this report are fictitious.

"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.