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.

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 of collecting medical data." With this fact, 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 run when using artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine today and in the future. 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.