1. This year, 45,800 Catalan students have taken the selectivity exams. Approximately 96% of these students have passed the exam to access university. Congratulations. Then, newspapers dedicate pages and more pages to publish the cut-off grade of each career, of each faculty. The result is that 6 out of 10 young people in the country have secured a place in their first university option in the July assignment. Or, in other words, there is a 40% of students who will not be able to pursue exactly the career they wanted. In one place or another, all these thousands of enthusiastic young people are starting a four-year journey, at least, that will take them to who knows where. How many walls are full of diplomas of careers with which you will never earn a living?

The Catalan education system is worse than it seems. Or not. Rivers of ink have been written about it. For those not versed in the subject, like myself, figures can help us organize our thoughts. A recent OECD study requires us to qualify the diagnosis and, above all, to review the necessary responses. In fact, the study proposes recommendations that connect with challenges shared by many other sectors that, like education, are immersed in accelerated and profound transformations.One of the elements that draws attention to the Catalan education system is the decline in PISA results. Catalonia started from a relatively advantageous position, but it has accumulated a persistent and pronounced setback, and now it is below other benchmarks. These headlines help to foster a sense of decline. However, there are aspects that have received less attention and that qualify - if not change - the diagnosis. The first: the decline in results is generalized. This forces us to look for part of the explanation in phenomena shared with other countries, probably beyond the direct reach of our education system. Something has changed that hinders learning.One piece of data gives us clues: the proportion of students with special support needs has gone from less than 10% in 2017 to almost 40% this year. You read that right: four out of ten students require differentiated attention. This is an average for the whole of Catalonia; in some centers it is lower and in others, higher. Among the factors that are growing the most is autism, with an increase of 155%. However, part of these increases are due to a better capacity to detect the support that each student needs, and the educational system intends to offer more personalized attention, quite the opposite of the narrative of a decadent system. Data like this should trigger debates and research that go beyond the educational sphere.Socioeconomic factors

Second, the decline in PISA results is more intense in Catalonia than in the OECD countries as a whole or in other reference regions. However, if the change in the socioeconomic composition of the student body is taken into account, the differential is substantially reduced. In other words: the decline is greater because the proportion of students with unfavorable socioeconomic conditions has increased. The OECD, and other academic studies, link this in part to the increase in child poverty and migratory flows. Once again, it is advisable to avoid simplifications: it is not that these students have less academic potential, but rather that they find themselves with more difficult economic and family conditions, late incorporations into the system, and linguistic barriers. The sum of these factors makes teaching difficult and affects school performance. The results of students from affluent socioeconomic backgrounds are similar to those of other reference regions.The focus, therefore, must be on how to adapt the educational system to an environment that has changed rapidly and become more complex. Thus, the specter of decline is dispelled, the need to flee simplistic headlines is recalled, and at the same time, action is called for. The stress under which the educational system lives requires more resources and, according to the OECD report, the effectiveness with which they are used also needs to be improved. Support for each center must be adjusted according to its changing needs and, at the same time, stable teaching teams must be guaranteed who know and can support the students.This same environment also demands a boost to the professional training system and the creation of mechanisms to detect and disseminate best practices. These are challenges that are not exclusive to education. No sector escapes the accelerated social and technological transformation we are experiencing. No company can avoid rethinking its processes, identifying good practices, or keeping employees trained in a context of change and limited resources. We are all familiar with the confusion and anxiety that this situation generates, and which often fuels resistance to change and distrust.However, the education system is not just another sector. It is the cornerstone upon which society is built. If we want it to remain prosperous, just, and free, it must take a step forward: assume leadership and set the path. We need the education system to teach us a lesson again.

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When in January 2025 President Salvador Illa announced that he was signing an agreement with the OECD, the reaction was one of great reticence. The context did not help at all. We were coming from a report by experts from the country itself that had remained as just one more diagnosis. What new could international experts tell us that we didn't already know? Nor did the image the OECD has in education help, although those of us who have known it from the inside know that there is life beyond PISA. Its reviews of educational policies systematically incorporate objectives of equity, inclusion, pedagogical quality, leadership, and well-being, and are based on an extensive consultation process with the actors in the system. Another issue – they are well-founded criticisms – is the cost of these reports.Now that we have the OECD report, intelligence is needed to make the most of this collaboration. To begin with, it is positive to put Catalonia's education system on the map and have a report like those of Scotland, Wales, and Quebec. It would also be good for the Minister of Education to be invited to the OECD International Summit on the Teaching Profession, the main global forum on teaching policies, which annually brings together education ministers and leaders of reference education systems. The United Kingdom brings representatives from the governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.It is advisable to read the report carefully and avoid reductionist headlines. It is surprising that, often, everything has been reduced to a debate about ratios. Because the OECD's message is different, and much deeper. The report "Improving learning outcomes in Catalonia" does not seek a single cause nor does it offer any miraculous recipe, but rather it changes the question: it invites us to stop thinking only about which reforms we want to promote and to concentrate on the real capacity of the system to make them possible.This perspective is especially relevant for Catalonia. Over the last few decades, we have approved laws, decrees, curricular frameworks, and programs; we have incorporated concepts such as equity, inclusion, competencies and center autonomy. But too often we have confused political decision with real transformation, as if a reform already existed when it has been published in the DOGC. The decisive question is another: what happens next? What happens when a policy reaches the territorial services? Who accompanies the management teams? How are the necessary professional capacities built? How do we know if what we have designed really reaches the classrooms? What do we do when we discover that it does not arrive?The OECD hits the nail on the head when it talks about coherence, coordination, and implementation capacity. The idea already appeared a decade ago in the report Learning education systems: a strategic horizon for Catalonia, which I prepared at the request of the Higher Council for the Evaluation of the Education System of Catalonia. International trends were clear: the systems that achieve the best results are not those that accumulate the most reforms, but those that learn from evidence, from the experience of schools, their professionals, and the mistakes made. They learn because they have spaces of trust and governance capable of ensuring continuity in policies beyond electoral cycles.

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New ruling against Catalan in schools. The Supreme Court (TS) has ruled that Spanish cannot be excluded from the signage of public educational centers in Catalonia. It does so by annulling a section of a document on the organization and management of educational centers for the 2022/23 academic year, which was approved by the Generalitat in July 2022 and stated that "the signage of the center's spaces is in Catalan, Occitan in Aran, and in Catalan Sign Language if applicable, which are the reference languages of the educational system." The Supreme Court rules against a judgment by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), following an appeal filed by the Assembly for a Bilingual School of Catalonia with the support of the Prosecutor's Office.

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The increase in the 2026 Budgets, with a record expenditure of 49.162 billion euros, represents a necessary injection of resources to strengthen one of the Government's priority areas: education. The Department of Education and Vocational Training is one of the main beneficiaries of the new accounts, with an allocation of 8.356 billion euros, 24.5% more than in 2023, representing 20.7% of the Generalitat's total expenditure.

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Administering insulin to a diabetic student or changing a gastric button are needs that teachers or school assistants at schools and institutes often have to manage. These are tasks for which many have no training and which generate insecure situations for families and also for the teachers who have to manage these types of cases. Now, however, in some educational centers these episodes will be reduced, as the Government has announced that next year half of schools and institutes – public and private – will have a nurse who will come to the center to provide care. This does not mean that each school will have a nurse permanently, but rather that the same professional will be responsible for this task in several schools and institutes in the area in a programmed manner. The forecast is that this Education and Health program will reach all centers in the 2027-2028 academic year.

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"We saw that they were finishing ESO without the title because they were very far from what the curriculum requires, and of course, they left with one hand in front and another behind," explains Loles Resa, head of secondary studies at the Sant Josep de Gràcia school. She speaks about what some students at the center had experienced, but it is not an isolated situation. According to the Equitat.org yearbook released this week, after many years of increasing or remaining stable, in the last five academic years the rate of ESO graduates has fallen consecutively. Despite being high, the percentage has gone from 93% to 86% in the 2024-2025 academic year, the lowest ESO graduation rate in fifteen years.

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"Even if our sole concern were national economic growth, we would have to protect humanistic education." This is stated by the American philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum (New York, 1947), according to whom, in schools and universities worldwide, the exact opposite is happening: the humanities (literature, history, philosophy, etc.), as well as the arts, are increasingly scorned, if not directly eliminated. What is happening to us? Nussbaum is in no way against hard sciences or technological knowledge. But she warns against the error of despising humanistic knowledge and the critical thinking associated with it. And she warns that, at the same time as the curriculum is being stripped of humanistic elements, the pedagogy of memorization is being reimposed (obviously, this does not mean she rejects all memorization).

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Catalan teachers already know which school or institute they will be working in next academic year. This Tuesday, the Department of Education published the definitive destinations for teaching staff for the 2026-2027 academic year, known as the summer assignments. The publication of the position each teacher and professor will fill has been made one month earlier than previously done and after last year there was a major upheaval when a "deliberate" error by one of the department's employees forced the entire process to be repeated and its results to be delayed.

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After the pandemic, this academic year that has just ended has surely been the hardest of recent years. The entrenched problems in the school world have finally burst the seams of a system that neither the government, nor teachers, nor pedagogues can manage to revive. Within the framework of the global educational crisis, marked by the loss of authority and the overprotection of children, the Catalan case has its own characteristics and tensions within a complicated negative drift.

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More poor students, more students needing support, and an investment that, despite increasing, is not managing to improve educational results. This is the radiography of the situation of Catalan education provided by Equitat.org – formerly Fundació Bofill – in its 2026 yearbook.

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A petition on the Change.org platform has collected over a thousand signatures in just 24 hours, calling for a review of the mathematics exam for the PAU (University Entrance Exams). On Tuesday, it became known that this year's test achieved an average score of 4.18; a failing average and the lowest since 2014, when it was a bare 4. In fact, in the last twelve years, the average for this subject has only been a fail on three occasions: this year (4.18), 2024 (4.87), and 2014 (4).

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At the demonstration of the last school year strike and after the nowon the vote on the agreement with the Department of Education, one of the most repeated comments among teachers was that school assemblies should have a decisive role in negotiations with the Government. In fact, in the speeches at the end of the protest, the first to speak were the representatives of the educational assemblies and not the union spokespersons, as usual. Neither the comments nor the protagonists on stage are a coincidence: more than 500 school assemblies have been registered since the website of the Educational Assembly of Catalonia (AEC) opened in February. Furthermore, more than a hundred teachers attended the sixth assembly of the AEC held last weekend.the sixth assembly of the AEC held last weekend more than a hundred teachers attended.

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The teachers' unions leading the mobilizations to demand educational improvements have once again warned this Saturday that the next school year will be turbulent and that protests will disrupt classrooms from the start of the first term.

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Admired for its singular beauty, the town of Cadaqués resists losing one of the most cherished distinctive features by its neighbours and that makes them feel most proud: its particular "salty talk", with a vocabulary and expressions so genuine that it is considered a dialectal variety with its own name: Cadaquesenc. Although it is one of the fishing villages on the Girona coast where the "salty talk" has been best preserved, largely thanks to its geographical isolation, Cadaqués is finding it increasingly difficult to preserve its linguistic uniqueness due to the homogenizing power of social networks, the pressure of tourism, immigration, and demographic changes. "If Catalan is in danger, imagine Cadaquesenc!", warns philologist Pep Vila, author of the book Paraulari de Cadaqués.

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New movement in the Department of Education. The ministry led by Esther Niubó has signed up the until now first deputy mayor of Rubí, Víctor García Correas, to join the Secretariat for Educational Improvement, as reported by Ràdio Rubí and confirmed by sources from Education to ARA. However, the new signing on Via Augusta has generated controversy and has been criticized by La Intersindical, as last year the person who was also responsible for Education in Rubí made statements against Catalan in a municipal plenary session and apologized shortly after.made statements against Catalan in a municipal plenary session and apologized shortly after.

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Highly commendable: a university of science and technology like the UPC has awarded an honoris causa doctorate to a philosophy professor, Dr. Joan Manuel del Pozo, from the University of Girona, a person who has dedicated his entire life to education.

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This Sunday's event was the last major mobilization of teachers before the end of the school year, and also the unions' final warning to the Government that the resumption of classes in September could be just as turbulent if an agreement is not reached. Thousands of teachers and professors took to the streets again this morning in Barcelona to force "a change in public education". This time, moreover, they had another objective: to show that they have the support of families and society.

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Rereading Oriol Bohigas, I found in his diaries a reference to his time at the mythical Institut-Escola. He recounts an anecdote illustrating the civic spirit of that exemplary institution, which was meant to be the vanguard of republican educational change. The dictatorship destroyed it all. Damned authoritarian intolerance, which is returning... Educational optimism, tinged with an essential veil of naivety, remained buried for decades. But we must also return to it. Urgently.

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The streets are full of "The dignity of education", written on huge banners. This is what the demonstrations and teachers' strikes are demanding. The resounding no to the agreement reached by the union representatives, with the loud booing of the representative to tell her "We are the ones who are in the classroom" and "It was not a matter of salary", reveals to us the moment we are in. No, it wasn't about working conditions alone, because what teachers want is to be able to exercise their profession properly. They have said it very clearly: well-being is not solely a matter of working conditions; what is being claimed is to exercise the profession with dignity.The teacher unrest is now compounded by a fracture in union representation. Who represents the teachers? Jordi Muñoz's analysis is very accurate regarding the loss of institutional mediations, which in the case of education translates into a crisis of the school itself as an institution: when the classic forms of representation and conflict management falter, the school's capacity to sustain a shared framework of meaning, authority, and professional trust also becomes more fragile. Jordi Muñoz's analysis regarding the loss of institutional mediations, which in the case of education translates into a crisis of the school itself as an institution: when the classic forms of representation and conflict management falter, the school's capacity to sustain a shared framework of meaning, authority, and professional trust also becomes more fragile.

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