After a pause in the mobilizations and the indefinite teachers' strike on June 11, the involved entities have agreed on "the need to maintain unity of action and continue promoting the mobilization process," which is materialized in a call to demonstrate on September 12. "It has been agreed to continue working together within the framework of a strike, currently suspended, with the aim of resuming the demands raised to the Ministry of Education and demanding a real negotiation that provides a response to the teachers' demands," they declare.

Look: today, as everyone knows, the school year was supposed to start, and it has not started due to the teachers' strike. Just as they ended the last school year, groups of teachers have cut off traffic on the Barcelona ring roads first thing in the morning. With the difference that today was a very special day for the students, the first day of school. The one in which there is anxiety, excitement, nerves, emotions, expectations… That is why I think that, regardless of how we have arrived here, a country that begins the school year with a teachers' strike is a country that has hit rock bottom. Denying the first day of excitement at school may be a preparation for the disappointments that will come with adult life, but it is a failure for everyone, that is already understood.It is a failure for everyone, with shared responsibilities. There are foresight problems: if Catalonia goes from 6 to more than 8 million inhabitants in 25 years, the school system must be sized accordingly. If the school is to be inclusive, that is, to cater to students with special needs, more hands are needed. If it is to be in Catalan, it must be taken into account that today we are a multilingual country, which makes immersion difficult. If it is also desired, logically, that students leave school knowing how to read, write, calculate, reason, and speak well, then teachers must be excellent and, therefore, one must be demanding in access to the teaching profession. And teachers must be paid well. There is a problem of political authority. The mess of the PISA tests and these two wasted months of summer holidays have shown that there is a functional problem in the Department of Education. All the ministers have had problems with the unions, but now we have gone from the unrest of the Cambray era to that of the Niubó era, as if they did not master the teaching civil service and did not understand the effects of the decisions they make, such as agreeing to that reduction of the power of school principals, and doing so with minority unions in the sector. The unions cannot give many lessons either. The USTEC approved an agreement with the Department of Education last May and asked for a vote in favor of the pact, but the majority of teachers voted against it. The result is a Government without authority and unions whose representativeness has been damaged. But, look, on a morning like this, taking an inventory of responsibilities is not enough. We must be able to break this negative vicious circle. And we must break it by affirming that we can do it. Catalonia has a very long pedagogical tradition. The department has resources (they are never enough, but they are not few, and it is promised that there will be more). The first ones who would not want to strike are the teachers. And in Catalonia, the school is under Spanish judicial and political attack. If there are so many of us who want to get out of this, we must be able to get out of it. And making a great country agreement for education, thinking about the students and the future of the country, is increasingly necessary.Look, today the results of the PISA tests have been published, from which Catalonia has been excluded because the sample was not valid. Well then, Spain as a whole obtains the worst results in its history. For example, the Spanish results in reading have plummeted.If we apply the results of Catalonia, with this invalid sample that was apparently better designed to produce better results, we find that the Catalan results remain below those of Madrid –which heads the state ranking with 477 points– and surpass Castile and León (472) by only two points and Cantabria (470) by four. Catalonia also remains ahead of the Spanish average (457) and of the European Union and the OECD (both with 463 points). Even so, this unreal Catalonia would still be very far from the international top 5, which ranges from 488 points in the United Kingdom to 525 in Japan. A first day of school without classes must call us to a commitment so that it never happens again. We must be able to do it, shaking off selfish and defeatist approaches. Good morning.

The unions were clear that this Tuesday's strike call was a “difficult” one. Difficult because they did not want to lower the tone or the demands, but, at the same time, the first day of school "is a very important day," the sector's union leaders admitted to ARA just a few days ago. Thus, the turnout for this new day of protests –the sixth this year– has been much lower than in previous calls. Education assures that 12.6% of teachers have joined the strike, while the unions raise this figure to 30%.

In the latest teacher mobilizations of the academic year, one of the actors that emerged to represent teachers was the Educational Assembly of Catalonia (AEC). An organization, outside of the unions, created from each of the school and institute assemblies in Catalonia. Its rise has been so great that it was the AEC, and not the unions, that first announced the strike for the start of this academic year. Roger Rovira and Marta García are teachers and members of the AEC.

This Tuesday will be the sixth time that Catalan teachers have been called to strike across Catalonia in less than a year. In fact, if all the territorial strikes that were organized at the end of last school year are taken into account, a teacher or professor in the Catalan educational system who has participated in all of them will have been on strike for almost ten days – and, therefore, without pay – this 2026. Nevertheless, USTEC and the CGT, the two unions on the board calling for the stoppage – joined by the Intersindical and COS – and the brand new Catalan Educational Assembly (AEC) clearly see that the strike for the first day of school is "necessary", since, in their view, the Government has not properly reopened negotiations following the teachers' rejection of the pre-agreement in May.

This summer, at a small musical evening in a village in the Alta Segarra, two girls aged 7 and 11 went up on stage and recited two poems learned at school and two of their own. They had stage presence, good diction and good pronunciation, and two clear, cheerful voices. The image made me think about the educational crisis we are experiencing. Amidst all the difficulties that education carries, two girls found enough courage to expose themselves in front of a large audience. The poems they had written were original and funny, and they built a personal narrative. "Do you go to the same school?", I asked them afterwards. "No –they told me–, but we have had the same teacher and tutor: we like him a lot!". Behind it all there was, then, a teacher who had helped them discover that they could write, think, have a voice and be heard.This is one of the greatnesses of the school. And also one of the reasons why it is very worrying that distrust is spreading like wildfire: between families and centers, between teachers and the administration, between managements and the system. It is the resounding symptom of an educational crisis that the country must face.The school year will begin with a strike. The unions celebrate the agreed-upon improvements but want to continue negotiating and continue to denounce working conditions that hinder teaching work: lack of time, unbearable heat in the classrooms, bureaucracy, exhaustion, difficulties in attending to diversity, and an inclusion that is often proclaimed without offering the necessary resources. They also demand that Catalan be defended without ambiguity, politically and normatively, to ensure that it is the language of learning, reception, and cohesion of the educational system. It is not a new malaise, nor can it be resolved by simply appealing to the responsibility of the teachers. If we want a good school, we must guarantee the conditions so that professionals can do their job well.

Confirmed. On the first day of this 2026/27 school year there will be a teachers' strike. This was announced by USTEC –the majority union within the education sector– and the CGT after meeting this Thursday morning with the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó. Upon leaving the meeting, where for the first time, members of the new Educational Assembly of Catalonia (AEC) were also invited, the spokesperson for USTEC, Iolanda Segura, criticized that, in the union's view, the Government is not members of the new Educational Assembly of Catalonia (AEC), yet willing to open a new cycle of negotiations to address the problems of public education. "They have not made us a proposal for a calendar of these meetings where we can negotiate [...], therefore, we invite the entire collective to join the strike to move towards the public school that our country needs and that our students need," argued Segura. For her part, from the CGT, the secretary general of the Federation of Education, Laura Gené, stated that the group's demands are clear and are "exactly the ones that existed" and that led to a "resounding no" to the May pre-agreement. "This is not about wages, this is about resources," she said.

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.

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.

"We don't build with bricks. The raw material with which we work and obtain academic results is very variable. 30 years ago this material was quite stable; ten years ago it was stable enough, but now nothing is stable." This is how Jordi Satorra, president of the directors' association Axia and a teacher for 24 years, defines the emergency situation of the Catalan education system.

The educational situation in Catalonia is complex, generating intense emotions, firm positions, and frustration. In this context, it is important to remember a key idea. When emotional tension increases, the capacity for reflection and the quality of decisions decrease. In conflict situations, the brain's amygdala, responsible for emotional reactions, activates defensive responses, while the prefrontal regions, responsible for critical thinking, planning, and complex decision-making, reduce their effectiveness. In other words, when we feel threatened or neglected, we listen worse, nuance less, and find less space to build agreements. Therefore, reducing tension is not weakness, but a possibility for dialogue. Stable agreements are not usually born from emotional escalation, but from the recovery of a minimum of trust that allows us to listen to the other without giving up our own positions.However, it would be a mistake to reduce the current debate to issues of ratios, salaries, or resources for diversity support, even though their importance is undeniable. These elements are essential for a quality education, but they do not, on their own, explain the complexity of the current moment or resolve all its tensions. Collective humility is needed to recognize that education is a living system where pedagogical, social, cultural, economic, technological, and emotional factors interact. There are no single causes or simple solutions.In this context, the curricular debate should also become a central element. We live in a dynamic and changing world, and education must serve to empower society in its leading role in these changes. We often simplistically, and too often partisanly, oppose memory and skills, knowledge and creativity, content and motivation. But the human brain does not work like that. Scientific evidence shows that creativity requires prior knowledge, that critical thinking requires information, and that problem-solving depends on mental schemes built through learning. Therefore, mnemonic learning remains relevant. The problem is not memorizing, but doing so without understanding. The great challenge is to place knowledge in meaningful contexts, connected with current reality and the interests of the students. Creativity does not replace knowledge, but it is key to reorganizing it and making it operational. That is why it is equally essential.

"Educational dignity has won" and "It wasn't about money. We are fighting for a new educational model". These have been the messages of the two main banners of this Friday's teacher mobilization. The first was the banner at the head of the demonstration that gathered around 15,200 teachers in Barcelona's Lluís Companys promenade, according to the Guàrdia Urbana, and up to 90,000 according to the unions. A banner that, unlike those of recent demonstrations, was entirely yellow – the color in defense of public schools – and without the name of any union. The second banner is that of the stage in Parc de la Ciutadella, where the demonstration ended with speeches and a booing of teachers at the spokesperson for the USTEC union, Iolanda Segura, after the organization campaigned for a yes vote on the agreement with Education and in its own consultation, 65% of teachers voted against it.

Teachers and professors rejected the agreement between the unions and the Department of Education and the strikes will continue. In fact, this morning, a group of teachers occupied the building of the territorial services of the department in the Zona Franca of Barcelona, in the first of the mobilizations that will continue from here until the end of the school year. All of this is very bad news because everything that interrupts the daily life of the school ends up harming the students' education. And with a child poverty rate (under 18 years old) of more than 30%, if school fails, almost everything fails. Consider that there are thousands of Catalan children who, besides learning, go to school to eat a hot meal.A 65% of teachers who participated in the consultation (which was 60% of the total staff) voted against the agreement reached by the majority unions and the Government. Therefore, the responsibilities for the situation are widely distributed, between the Government and the unions.To begin with, the Government made a complete mistake the day it signed an agreement with UGT and Comissions, which are not the majority unions, as if to suggest that the teachers' protests had already ended or no longer had any reason to continue. That was an almost reckless error, because it angered the teachers even more. And USTEC, which later signed an improved and expanded agreement, has now been disavowed by its own people. In other words, as Murphy's Law states, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong, and today we are in an unknown situation, and in a conflict whose end is not in sight.And for that very reason, it would now be very important not to make any more mistakes so that we don't all get hurt any further. Because look, we have problems in this country (as in all countries in the world), but that of education is the most serious problem that Catalonia has. The most serious. Because it affects the present and the future of the country, it affects millions of people, in their training, their critical thinking, their possibilities for personal development, their professional future…Not being wrong means the direct involvement of the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa. It means that the opposition should be very selective in its wear and tear on the Government and that we should all try to reach agreements for the country. Because the person responsible for the current situation is the current government, with Councillor Niubó at the helm. But that schools in Catalonia are not doing well is not new. There are responsibilities of all the parties that have governed in the deterioration. We are facing the deep malaise of an education system in emergency and I fear, I notice, how would I put it... that we are facing it with old negotiation categories from the government as an employer and the unions, but that no one with authority is bringing wills together to define the problem, much less the solutions.

Tension cannot be maintained indefinitely. The teachers' vote against the agreement reached by the unions and the Government must give way to a new phase. It is urgent to find a way out that does not involve union confrontation.

Two hours after learning that 39,500 teachers have voted against the preliminary agreement between unions and Education, the minister Esther Niubó, appeared to explain that the measures of the pact would go ahead. "The commitment to implement this agreement is there," she defended, and recalled that "only" USTEC has said it will not sign the agreement, while Professors de Secundària, CCOO, and UGT will. The minister explained this after an emergency meeting with President Salvador Illa.

The day has arrived. After 72 hours of voting, teachers revealed this midday that they reject the preliminary agreement of the majority unions and Education. They did so in a consultation in which more than 60,000 teachers participated (approximately 60% of the teachers and professors in the public education system). Of these, 65.1% rejected the agreement and, therefore, have committed to continuing to mobilize. In contrast, those who viewed the preliminary agreement favorably remained at 34.9%.

A national police officer shoves and throws to the ground a person who was peacefully protesting in Valencia. He does so like a bad policeman, with disproportionate force for the situation, which was a protest by teachers who were going to block a street's traffic. A bad policeman and a bad person: he makes her fall like a coward, from behind, without the woman being able to see him coming, and from the blow he delivers, he breaks her nose when the woman hits the ground with her face. But even more outrageous is the response of the police unions to the Spanish government delegate, Pilar Bernabé: “You will not investigate anything [...]. You already assume someone's guilt [...]. If you go out to block streets, you expose yourself to being kicked out.” In reality, there is not much to investigate, because the policeman's guilt is demonstrated in the video. And it is one thing to expose yourself “if you go out to block streets” and another is to have to endure the gratuitous violence of someone who feels impunity because they are uniformed.There are police officers who complain about the same thing: that the times when people saw a police officer and obeyed without a word are already history, that now people confront them and have violent attitudes, because it's not just that they no longer instill fear, but they have also lost authority. But then comes the vicious cycle: for them to be believed, the verbal and physical attitude of some officers is increasingly surly, and even more preemptively aggressive, by default, to begin by demanding respect, which only increases the distance between two worlds that barely touch or know each other anymore, such as that of citizens and that of the police, because people only see police officers passing by locked in cars and we assume they are behind the street surveillance cameras. And thus, another link between citizenship and public authorities is being severed.

Teachers' protests have been going on for months at various points in Catalonia, with blockades on the country's main roads and numerous slow marches through the capitals of each province. Although some of these blockades and obstructions have seen tense scenes with drivers who were trapped, the vast majority of mobilizations have passed without incident. All, however, have been closely monitored by agents of the Mossos d'Esquadra, deployed to ensure that there were no significant disruptions. These agents, normally public order officers, have had the directive during the latest protests to be especially sensitive to these mobilizations, according to sources consulted by ARA.

On the second day of the consultation on the agreement with the Department of Education, one-third of teachers have already cast their vote. Specifically, more than 32,000 teachers—out of a total census of almost 97,000 people—have voted in the consultation which will close on Thursday at 12 p.m. Meanwhile, teacher protests continue, albeit with much less mobilization capacity. This Tuesday, the strike called in Barcelona had a 12.2% turnout, according to data from the Department of Education.

The indefinite strike of teachers in the Valencian Community is heading into its fourth week with growing tension and almost blocked negotiations. Also with a standoff with the Spanish government delegation, which has initiated the procedure to open disciplinary proceedings against the National Police officer who this Sunday assaulted a teacher who was demonstrating at the gates of the Ministry of Education to ask the regional government to accept the teachers' demands. In the video shared on social media, the woman, a 68-year-old retired teacher, is seen walking down the street amidst the protests. Then, an officer, whose head is covered with a helmet, runs towards her, pushes her violently from behind, and knocks her to the ground.