Next week, schools and high schools will reopen their doors. Thousands of children and adolescents will reunite with their classmates, meet the education professionals who will accompany them every day, and resume a routine that is much more than going to class: it is learning, growing, socializing, and finding a space of protection and opportunities.And like every year, we return to talk about the cost of materials, whether there will be enough teaching staff, the available public places, the school canteen, and the conditions of the educational centers. This year, in addition, we are talking about mobilizations. And also about what will happen with the field trips that many centers will stop doing.But it is not enough to take inventory of shortcomings every month of September. It is necessary to ask oneself what Catalan public education really needs. The problems that we will face again this September are not new, they are not unforeseen, and they are not solved with patches. They are the result of political decisions accumulated year after year.Public education does not need gestures. It needs a clear, sustained, and honest political commitment. And this commitment begins with how we plan the educational offer. It is necessary to guarantee a sufficient public network in each territory, for all children and adolescents, and to strengthen it instead of weakening it. Year after year, groups are closed in public schools, and, paradoxically, educational grants that do not respond to the country's real educational needs are maintained, or even expanded.And it also involves a matter that can no longer be postponed: the free nature of public education. It is not normal, nor has it ever been, for families to have to bear costs linked to schooling. Every euro that a family pays to educate their son or daughter in the public system is one more inequality that the system tolerates. Access to quality public education cannot depend on the income of each household.This issue goes beyond the expenses strictly linked to what happens inside the classroom. Let us think, for example, about the school canteen, which should be free and universal and form part of an educational policy that guarantees equity; or about the outings and activities that schools incorporate into their educational project, and which currently can depend on financial contributions from families or on the availability of professionals to make them possible depending on the school.