"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.

Notice for castaways and other products derived from existential shipwreck: this article is based on real-life flotation devices. It begins on a moving island. Zulu time. September 2026. Interior day. Public transport in Barcelona (it could be any other space-time of the bitter Catalonia). The boy (9 years old) sits on the floor like a rock from the Upper Chalcolithic. The mother: "Oh, honey, stand up, the floor is dirty". Rock boy: "I don't want to!!!" (A unique phrase, like an expansive sonic destructive missile.) More mother: "Oh, honey, it's dirty, people can't pass, oh, your trousers, oh, oh, oh...." Operation dialogue and more dialogue. Final result of the journey: the kid didn't budge a micrometer. Nor will he for the next thousand years. 1st Century of the human rock.

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.

It will not be easy to turn around the strained climate into which the educational world has fallen. The atmosphere has degraded too much. The good offices of the president of the Council of Education, Joan Manuel del Pozo, who is tasked with redirecting the situation by seeking the pacification of the sector and a great country agreement, give reasons for hope. But beyond good words and a good temperament, facts, clear priorities, and sensible and brave decisions will be needed. Above all, a lot of common sense: because what is needed is to change course, but without great inventions and, also, with a little patience when it comes to obtaining results. There will not be, like in football, magical comebacks.

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.

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 is good news that the president of the Generalitat wants to make education a national priority. It is also good that he has put the goal of reaching 6% of GDP in education on the table. After the start of the school year marked by the strike and the disaster of the PISA tests, it is a good thing that the Government has resolved to look ahead and switch on the high beams. The president wants to generate consensus in the debate to take action; he will start by holding a round of talks with the parties and tasks the Education Council with being the instrument of the debate. These are, for the moment, the specifics of the proposal.For too long, voices have been raised to demand more resources and warn of the crisis in the education system, but the solutions proposed point in different directions. With different interests and visions, who will set the course of the debate? The president of the Education Council, interviewed in this newspaper, acknowledges the difficulty of reaching consensus and points out that generating a new climate of calm debate and trust would in itself be a first step forward.It does not seem, however, an easy milestone. New mobilizations are being announced, and the first thing that has been requested from the government is a calendar, budgetary resources, and concrete measures. Where will the money come from, how and when will it be invested? Because the 6% figure is very important, but it is not an educational policy. Money can make changes possible, but it does not decide by itself what change we want to make. Trust is not requested, it is built. And it is built when a promise has a schedule, an investment has a purpose, and a reform reaches the centers. When professionals can see that what is decided in the institutions ends up changing, even if gradually, their work and the students' learning opportunities. Perhaps the great educational debate should not reopen the old trenches: competencies or contents, innovation or tradition, equity or excellence, public or state-subsidized, screens or books. In the classrooms, these dilemmas do not exist with such simplicity. Reality is more complex and calls for fewer trenches and more capacity to move forward together. Miquel Puig warned, in these very pages, about the risk that a new national debate might end up becoming another round of consensus-building while difficult decisions continue to wait. Catalonia does not need to start a debate all over again because we are not starting from zero. We have a law and we have research, universities, schools that have accumulated experience, professional networks, management teams that have learned to manage complexity, and many practices that we know add value. Previous participatory debates have been held, we have magnificent written proposals that have remained dead letters. Programs that have gone down in history and were pioneers in their day.

To lead a "broad" and "calm" debate that allows for overcoming the educational crisis. This is the task that the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, officially entrusted this Monday to the president of the Education Council of Catalonia (CEC), Joan Manuel Del Pozo. Del Pozo will be the one to lead the country-wide debate to redefine the Catalan educational model. A dialogue that aims to "rebuild consensus" and "reconstruct" bridges with the education sector, as explained by the regional minister, Esther Niubó.

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.

Faced with an educational situation like the current one (with the low PISA 2025 results and the tensions at the start of the school year), it is understandable that solutions are being sought. The President of the Generalitat announced a national pact this week to save education. We will see how the initiative progresses. But the problem is that in education, we too often confuse looking for solutions with starting over.

Few –perhaps none– public matters are more important than the improvement of the deplorable state of education in Catalonia. That is why the messages that President Illa dedicated to it in his speech last Monday are worrying. Fundamentally, he specified two objectives: to increase the budgetary effort to 6% of the GDP (as established by the current education law of Catalonia) and to build a “consensus with the parties and the educational community” after a “national debate on the future of education”.Why are these two objectives worrying? Firstly, because the current law—within the framework of which this constant deterioration of educational results has occurred—was already the product of a consensus, which was already celebrated at the time—in 2009—as if it guaranteed something good. In fact, the only dissenting voices were so for reasons that had very little to do with the quality of education (on the part of IC, the persistence of a state-subsidized private sector, and on the part of the right, linguistic issues). Will a new consensus diagnose and rectify the causes of the failure by stepping on whatever toes are necessary, or, on the contrary, will it become an exercise in avoiding difficulties and leaving everything as it is? The second is much more likely than the first, because the dynamic of consensuses is normally to agree on what is easy and to sideline what is not. In fact, the immediate enthusiasm of Junts in accepting the president's proposal makes this clear, given that parties do not get enthusiastic when it comes to making decisions that disturb the status quo.As for increasing budgetary resources, one cannot be against it, but it must be pointed out that empirical evidence—both internationally and in Spain—shows that there is no relationship between expenditure per student and results (to be more specific, the OECD estimates that there is one when the amount allocated does not reach 75,000 dollars per student between the ages of 6 and 15, but not beyond this figure, and ours is much higher than this limit). If there were a relationship, Madrid would not be at the forefront of Spanish communities in terms of results, where the Basque Country or Extremadura would be. From the point of view of equity, an analysis carried out in Spain to measure the impact of budgetary effort on "academic resilience"—that is, the ability of students to overcome the level associated with their socioeconomic status—concludes that this impact is negligible, which is to say that an improvement in the results of our students from immigrant backgrounds or poverty is not to be expected simply by pouring more money into the system.In conclusion, Illa's recipe could perfectly lead us to an equally mediocre situation, but a much more expensive one. That, of course, after many hugs between the party representatives and even the social partners.Minister Niubó does not enthuse me (how could she enthuse me if she described as “policy-fiction” the hypothesis that the PISA test results would have been even worse if the Catalan centers, instead of excluding 23.2% of the students because they presented linguistic, cognitive, or behavioral disabilities, had limited themselves to excluding 5%?). She does not enthuse me, but I must say that her statements on Catalunya Ràdio four days before President Illa's speech seem much more accurate and, therefore, promising.Where the president says to increase the budgetary allocation, Niubó spoke of the need to “reorder the system before putting more resources into it”. Where he says to build a consensus, she said “recover the role of books and reading”, strengthen school libraries and “maintain inclusion, but placing more emphasis on educational success”; that is to say, she was pointing to concrete changes without waiting to reach a consensus on them.Does the situation of education demand more resources and demand consensus? Yes, but, above all, it demands leadership from a government that proposes reforms that will not please everyone (how could they please everyone if excellence is always the product of effort?) and that must represent a break with some practices that have been imposed in the name of equity and the well-being of children and that, therefore, some will consider must be defended tooth and nail.Precisely because the current model is the result of a consensus, modifying it requires courage. Will the Government have it? I do not know, but its absence would necessarily translate into the country's mediocrity and the rise of the parties that present themselves as capable of ending a situation that gives multiple signs of decay, which are not precisely those that participated in the 2009 consensus.

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.

Although distorted in the Catalan case, the PISA results we have just learned about will likely put back on the table the low level of our students in mathematics, reading comprehension, and science. We already knew this for some time and it has been discussed a lot. But until now, the attention has focused only on the first two topics, while science has been incomprehensibly ignored by public debate. Will we now see the discussion once again focus on mathematics and reading comprehension while science is left aside again?

Salvador Illa should launch in the "coming days" a round of contacts with parliamentary groups to promote a national pact on education that should serve to address the crisis the sector is experiencing. And in these conversations, he will also invite the far-right parties, Vox and Aliança Catalana. As the Government spokesperson, Sílvia Paneque, explained, the executive always includes all groups that make up the parliamentary arch in these types of calls, but added that neither Vox nor Aliança Catalana "have ever attended" these meetings. "The Government prioritizes agreements with groups that do not have hate speech," added Paneque. There is no established calendar yet and the Government has not specified whether Salvador Illa himself will be at these meetings, but Paneque stated that the president's "will" is for this round to begin "as soon as possible".

The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, has promised that within five years all public schools and high schools in the country will be air-conditioned. 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 2030-31 school year (when the current legislature will have already ended at least three years prior).

Yesterday, President Illa gave himself a bath of solemnity to highlight that he has reached the midpoint of his term with a budget for next year, a project to improve the financing system, and the country with the independence movement faded. And all of this is no small thing, considering he only has 42 deputies. Stability of today versus the independence paralysis of ten years, would be the message.Illa gave a speech, therefore, there were no uncomfortable questions nor did he make any self-criticism for the management problems, which was precisely what he boasted about in the election campaign two years ago. On the contrary, the idea was to convey an inspiring and visionary message (the conference was titled 'The future is here') on a quiet night.And within this presidential framework, the president made the announcement intended to make headlines: Illa will promote a great educational pact.“As president of the Generalitat, I am calling from this moment on the whole country to a debate on education, a debate to take action, a debate that will lead us to reach a new great country consensus for education. I will soon initiate a round of meetings with the political forces with parliamentary representation, I will ask the Education Council of Catalonia to be the instrument for this debate, from the knowledge and pluralism it represents. I commit to ensuring that the debate includes, now yes, reaching the 6% of public investment as established by the education law approved by the Parliament of Catalonia in the year 2009. A 6% of the resources of the country's gross domestic product destined for education. We must take Catalan education to excellence”.This has been their way of admitting that, after two years of management, this school year has begun with a teachers' strike and the conflict is far from over. We are in favor of this pact. Not today. Days ago, as you will surely remember if you follow us regularly. 15 days ago, on September 1st, I said here: “A country pact for education. Now or never, because what is at stake is the country itself”. And a week ago I stated that “reaching a great country agreement for education, thinking of the students and the future of the country, is increasingly necessary”. Therefore, it would be good news if this pact turned out well. It could turn out well, because we have the talent and it seems (Illa announced that it would move towards 6% of public investment in Education) that we will have the means. But the greatness and generosity of the Government, the opposition, the unions, the teachers, and the families are needed. I insist, hopefully this pact can be developed, because the future of the country depends on it, but the Government must admit that it has not been at all inspired when it comes to setting the course.Beyond the specific announcements, beyond what is said, there is what is meant. And yesterday, the president wanted to send a message of self-esteem, even of the joy of living, as when he said that “Catalonia is a wonderful place, where wonderful things happen”. I also believe it, but when a politician wants to generate enthusiasm in Catalonia, he must keep in mind that this is a country for which the Spanish Constitution and the Statute of Catalonia, and the financing, are too small, very small, and that the common regime does not inspire. And that this morning there are people looking at Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, who have signed a document more declarative than effective to form a common front and pressure London for independence and thinks that what is most exciting is giving a state to the nation.

At Walthamstow School for Girls (WSG), a public community school for girls aged 11 to 16 in northeast London, students are not allowed to wear false nails, those extensions that, whether you like it or not, make handwriting or even typing on a laptop difficult. Nor can they be painted with certain designs. It is one more measure, among others, that the management agreed upon in 2023 with the students. It was also agreed which hair dye is acceptable and which is not. Or which jewelry or nose piercings can be worn and what makeup is allowed and what is not.

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.

More professionals to strengthen inclusive education, more reception classrooms for newly arrived students, and more investment to renovate educational centers. These are some of the main novelties with which the 2026-2027 academic year begins in Catalonia, which starts with a forecast of more than 1.6 million students and 94,422 professionals in educational centers.In total, the system incorporates 1,830 new positions compared to last academic year: 1,103 teachers, 531 educational support professionals, and 196 administrative and service staff. The reinforcement focuses especially on attention to diversity and welcoming, but it also reaches physical spaces: seven centers will debut a new building or expansion, and investment in educational infrastructure is recovering levels not seen since 2008, according to the Department of Education and Vocational Training of the Generalitat.The Minister of Education and Vocational Training, Esther Niubó, has highlighted that these resources must allow for the incorporation into classrooms of “the greatest reinforcement of resources to strengthen the system and improve attention to the needs of the students”. According to the minister, the agreements that make this possible have mobilized 2.6 billion euros.More professionals for the inclusive school

One of the main commitments of the new school year is to strengthen the teams that serve students with diverse educational needs. The system incorporates 531 new educational support staff positions, distributed among profiles such as educators and social integrators, social workers, speech therapists, and special education teachers. The goal is to expand support within the centers and provide more tools to adapt the care to the needs of each student. A significant part of this increase is concentrated directly on inclusive education. Among the new additions are 146 special education teachers assigned to SIEI and SIEI+, the intensive supports that reinforce mainstream centers to attend to students with special educational needs; 100 social integrators in educational centers and 56 social workers and speech therapists in the psycho-pedagogical assessment and guidance teams.

]]>