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.

The minimum services in Catalonia during Wednesday's general strike will be more restrictive, in general, than those in the rest of the State, according to information provided by the various public administrations that have negotiated with the unions. In this regard, last week the employers' associations Foment del Treball and Pimec expressed “surprise” at minimum services in Catalonia that they described as “extremely low”.

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.

The time has come when everyone will have to decide, in the shadow of AI, whether they want to continue being human?

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.

Susanna Ramírez worked at a school in l'Escala based on the Montessori method. She liked it so much that, when later on she had to join another faculty, with a very different way of working, she contributed ideas and activities she had learned back then. She saw that they were well-received, to the point that a colleague encouraged her to post them on social media and share them. From this, the Instagram profile @propostes.per.infantil was born, a space that Susanna feeds with what she puts into practice in the classroom, with the simple goal of "weaving a network and helping each other out".

This school year is abnormal for a large part of the student body in Catalonia. More than 1,000 educational centers have been left without school camps or field trips –or with significant cuts– by decision of the teaching staff. This movement is part of a pressure strategy by teachers to demand that they be paid for these trips and overnight stays (last year it was already established that they would be compensated with 50 euros per night, but the unions see it as insufficient) and, above all, to urge the Department of Education to sit down and negotiate the unions' demands. This Tuesday, families made their move: 391 Student Family Associations (AFA) have sided with the teaching staff and joined forces to demand "concrete measures" from the government to recover these activities.

The outbreak of unrest in French secondary schools these last autumn weeks has taken the form of very concrete images. Outside, the late heatwave and storms; inside the classrooms, even though it was already the month of October, a stifling mugginess. One of the banners that could be seen in front of the Jean Perrin high school in Rezé said “35°, 35 par classe, mais le problème c’est nos téléphones”. The students have taken to the streets asking for very concrete, material, palpable things: fans, the repair of blinds, the urgent hiring of teachers to cover leaves of absence, and the reduction of class sizes. Among the hand-painted slogans that have spread across social media, there was one that synthesized with bitter irony the paradox of a generation: “You ask us to prepare for the future in classrooms that cannot withstand the present”.

The debate has returned regarding the duty of parents to monitor the social networks their children navigate.

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.

On the 8th I participated in Vic in the inauguration of the school year and, taking advantage of the trip, I got lost for a while in Costa Llibreter, the second-hand bookstore on Carrer de Sant Sadurní that has given me so many joys. In its back room I found the 5 volumes of Teatro histórico-crítico de la elocuencia española by Antoni Capmany (1756) or L'art de pensar, by Alfred Opisso (1919), which begins like this: “Among all the needs inherent to human life, none is more peremptory than the distinction between the true and the false, and this not only when dealing with the sciences, but with common existence, which demands the supremacy of the understanding for the guidance of our acts”.

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.

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.

In the image age, visual learning also carries specific weight in education, and it is precisely this educational potential of the moving image that turns Nextus into an educational tool. The digital platform, promoted by filmmaker and founder of DocsBarcelona, Joan Gonzalez, fosters critical thinking in young people and has received the award in the Education category of the ARA newspaper's FAR Awards.

In 2024 I wrote in this newspaper an article defending the recovery of mandatory readings in schools and high schools, making it clear that “eliminating mandatory readings is a way of preserving the logic of fleeting satisfaction”. I also underlined that reading “entails the responsibility of doing what we consider good because we have a vision of country and a shared heritage: Flaubert is French cultural heritage. What is ours?” 

The need to review teacher training and the way child poverty and rising complexity in classrooms are addressed have centered the debate in the first of the meetings promoted by Pimec on education, which has featured the voices of four former ministers of the sector: Irene Rigau, Anna Simó, Meritxell Ruiz, and Ernest Maragall. In the midst of a social debate and with a national debate underway to redefine the Catalan educational model –dynamited by the error in the PISA tests, but fueled by the protests by teachers and families in the last year–, all four have agreed that it is necessary to "shield education" from different political cycles to guarantee the country's future, since the educational system is a cradle for new generations and, therefore, for facing future economic and social transformations. This, of course, always "guided by the evaluation" of results.

Something uncomfortable happened to Sweden: for years it lived off the prestige of an educational system that was no longer achieving the same results. PISA 2012 made a problem difficult to ignore: 478 points in mathematics, 483 in reading, and 485 in science. But six years later they were 502, 506, and 499. The average explains only part of the story. In mathematics, between 2012 and 2018, the percentage of students below the basic level fell by 8.3 percentage points, and those reaching the highest levels grew by 4.6. TIMSS pointed in the same direction: Swedish 8th-grade students went from 484 points in 2011 to 501 in 2015.

Crying uncontrollably when losing, being unable to wait for commercials to end, or shouting because they are not allowed to go out with their friends are situations that show a certain difficulty in managing frustration. "Frustration is a skill that must be trained day by day, because we will encounter it throughout our entire life," asserts the educational coach Mar Milán.

We talk a lot about the educational crisis and we list issues that fuel it. Examples of this are the PISA results, the open conflict with the unions, the weariness of the teaching staff, the difficulties in tackling inclusive education, and the new training dynamics in classrooms that are not like those of the past. To complicate matters even further, Wolfgang Streeck recently recalled that what we call a "polycrisis" is a bundle of chained crises (housing, infrastructure, aging, inequality, government debt, anxiety about the future) that reinforce each other while states have less and less fiscal room and wages do not rise. School is not an island. It is the place where all these crises arrive every morning, with names and surnames, at nine o'clock sharp.