“Every morning I give breakfast to the early childhood education students, from I3 to I5, and the breakfasts of the little ones are always: Oreos, potato chips, chocolate snacks, and low-quality pastries. Every morning I think there should be a law that protects me from having to poison the children. For that, I would indeed go on an indefinite strike; it is worse than not knowing how to add, because they will get sick,” explains to Criatures Estel Marín, a teacher at a high-complexity school in Barcelona.

When I was eighteen, I didn't know what I wanted to be. It crossed my mind to be a flight attendant and I even weighed the possibility of becoming a criminologist, but the fact that I could reach university thanks to the teachers who had helped me throughout my schooling ended up steering me towards education. And this year, Raquel Elá celebrates her twenty years as a teacher in Catalonia.

The arrival of the internet, web pages, social networks, and artificial intelligence. New technologies and new ways of communicating have evolved in just a few years and have entered every dimension of our lives. Also in that of the youngest, and consequently, in the classrooms. If many educational centers have considered that it was necessary to leave mobile phones out of the classroom, along with WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok notifications, the challenge now is what to do with artificial intelligence and the chatbots that students access from the laptops they work with in class and at home. And not because new technologies cannot be integrated into the pedagogical reality of each center, but because, right now, the pedagogy that should be practiced is, precisely, about the use and abuse of these tools and how they affect learning.

I have started the school year seeing countless photos posted by my friends with teased hair and dressed in the synthetic neon-colored tracksuits typical of the eighties. It has been a viral trend on social media where people of all ages have asked artificial intelligence for an image that evokes this iconic decade. Our aesthetic has changed a lot, but I'll warn you that the school keeps the desks with greenish iron legs and a drawer underneath where chewing gum still gets stuck. Years pass, school furniture remains.

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.

Culture, educational leisure and transport face the start of the 2026-27 academic year with uncertainty. The reason is the stoppage of activities outside the classroom, which threatens an impact that goes well beyond schools. Still without concrete data on the extent of the effects, families, companies, associations, entities and experts warn of the educational, economic and social consequences of the temporary pressure measures by education professionals, who are demanding labor improvements.While negotiations with the Department of Education are not bearing fruit due to the unions' standoff, which, despite the agreement signed at the end of the school year, continue their standoff with the Government, the cultural sector is already starting to put numbers to the impact of the stoppage on school activities. In the world of performing arts, Óscar Rodríguez, a board member of ADETCA, the association of private Catalan theaters, explains that, on average, private theaters are recording 50% fewer school bookings compared to last year. In Barcelona, however, the drop is even more pronounced: "The figures are falling between 85 and 90% compared to last year in theaters like the Tantarantana or the Autèntica".ADETCA respects the demands of education professionals and ensures that it agrees with them, but warns that the situation "is directly harming a key sector for the culture of children and young people." It is not just a question of numbers and bookings, but also, Rodríguez remarks, "the undoing of an authentic tool for training and transformation."

You don't have to be an expert to deduce that if our students are doing very poorly in calculation and reading, they would need to increase (and intensify) the hours of mathematics and language, from primary to secondary school. This is as evident as it is complicated to rectify in the short term. Precisely, the latest innovations have stolen the spotlight from these two basic areas of knowledge and have been sacrificed (or mixed) with other proposals that are perhaps more attractive to students, but which PISA results confirm are distancing us dizzyingly from the minimum requirements.

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.

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After Eldiario.es revealed that Federico M.V. had been hired at the Mantellate school in Valencia—a teacher removed from the profession two years ago for practicing sexual conversion therapies on LGBTI people at an educational center in the Valencian town of Alaquàs—pressure from the school's Association of Families has caused this hiring to be cancelled.

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The school year begins, and with it, families set in motion an almost perfect machinery: the fashionable backpack, the wonderfully covered books, schedules squared to the millimeter, and WhatsApp groups in full swing. We try to anticipate everything so that our children begin school calmly and without difficulties. But, sometimes, in this legitimate attempt to protect them, we are literally leaving them unprotected, because we eliminate what will help them most to become strong: the small daily setbacks. The start of the school year is a magnificent moment to train resilience, especially when they haven't gotten the teacher they expected, or their best friend is in another class, or everyone says it will be a complicated year.

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A high-mountain journey as a routine gesture to get to school. In isolated indigenous communities, the right to education is measured in kilometers of mud, rivers without safe crossings, and paths with dangerous terrain. Meanwhile, classrooms endure in precarious conditions, sustained by teachers who multiply resources where public investment arrives late or only halfway, and families convinced that taking their children to school is both a right and an obligation. Every day is an epic, a reflection of a structural gap: the physical distance between remote areas and opportunities. What real options do children have when the first obstacle is the environment itself? This photo essay focuses on the determination of the families and the slowness of the solutions that puts the children of the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca, in western Panama, near the border with Costa Rica, at risk.

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The diversity we find in the classrooms of educational centers is a reflection of the society in which we live. However, in these contexts, this plurality is not defined only by different social and geographical realities or backgrounds, but also by the skills, aptitudes, attitudes, and learning rhythms of each student. Good classroom management requires taking this diversity into account at all levels, although, in some cases, the lack of resources or other situations that may arise lead to solutions that can affect this heterogeneity to a greater or lesser degree.

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Orelletes is a rabbit who is starting preschool (I3) and experiences it with the same intensity as many children who are entering a school for the first time. He cries, he doesn't like saying goodbye to his parents, he finds it hard to share toys, and he prefers to play alone, so he hides in a corner. With a lot of tact, the teacher helps him to breathe, to be calm, and he ends up joining the circle with the rest of the group. He is the protagonist of Orelletes at school, a story that aims to help experience this process from a kinder and more conscious space. Self-published by preschool teacher Meritxell Casanova, the story empathizes with the child and gives advice to parents to make these first weeks of schooling easier.

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Well, that's it. This week we are going back to school and even though, for the sake of appearances, teachers and students keep saying "how lazy we are and how little desire we have," the reality is that we are always excited (even if just a little bit) to start over. Starting a new school year is like falling in love again: new clothes, organizing plans, the desire to do it well. This year, yes.

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Mònica Bernabé is one of the European journalists who best knows Afghanistan. She first went there in 2000, during the first Taliban regime, lived there between 2006 and 2014, and has returned on several occasions, the last one this August 2026, when it has been five years since the withdrawal of American troops. We speak with her about what she has seen, what they have told her, and how she has disguised herself to be able to narrate the reality of Taliban Afghanistan, a regime that does not want foreign journalists and makes it difficult to report on what is happening in the country.

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The author Regina Rodríguez Sirvent has become one of the most powerful and fun voices in Catalan literature. After the phenomenon of Les calces al sol with more than 100,000 copies sold, she is now releasing Crispetes de matinada, in which her childhood friends are crucial characters and play a decisive role in the novel's plot. Because when Regina talks about her time at school, her first thought goes directly to her friends. “School is the foundation of my deepest friendships, it's the most important thing that happened to me and I keep all my school friends. With my friends, we have been very daring and very mischievous. We even opened the teachers' lounge to look for our grades, add extra positives, and we even photocopied exams!”

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Mari Pau Huguet (Estopanyà, 1963) is known for a professional life dedicated to Televisió de Catalunya. There she began her career and very likely it is also there where she will end it. But few know that she spent her entire childhood in the La Bordeta neighbourhood of Lleida. These were the sixties and seventies of the last century, when everything still happened in the street. “It was like living in a village, we didn't have a television and we spent the day playing outside the house,” recalls the journalist. These were times when she socialised with both boys and girls in all sorts of popular games, “like rope skipping, the handkerchief game and strong horse...”, she remembers.

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It was during the pandemic that Núria Casas installed the TikTok app and dared to make videos caricaturing different types of mothers, teachers, or comparisons about how school was a few years ago and how it is now. A direct and realistic format that has connected enormously with the public and has become her current job as a content creator.

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Many know the incredible story of overcoming of the Lleida pilot Isidre Esteve who, after becoming paraplegic from a motorcycle accident in 2007, it was transformed into a regular competitor in car rally raids, especially at the Dakar. But few know that his childhood in his native Oliana (in the Alt Urgell region) was crucial in forging a personality based on effort and respect for teachers and parents.

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The crisis in education in Catalonia not only has consequences today. If the degradation continues, the country condemns itself to a future of economic irrelevance and social fracture.

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