For days we have been living with this sticky heat. That puts us in a bad mood. That makes our children (and teachers, and monitors, and people who work in educational centers) finish the course inside boiling classrooms. The platform has denounced it Classrooms on Fire, and by moving its map of Catalonia you can see high school classrooms that reached 39 degrees. Also a chilling string of classes that have surpassed the legal limit, which states that “The temperature of the premises where sedentary work typical of offices or similar is carried out shall be between 17 and 27 degrees”. And the course has already ended and we seem to forget about it, but it shouldn't be like that.

It's not even 9 AM and in the classrooms of many schools in Catalonia, thermometers are already climbing above 27 degrees, despite being in a week of relative climate respite. This is the case at Institut La Sedeta, located in the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona, where since mid-May they systematically exceed 30 ºCin most areas of the center every day. During heat peaks, they have even reached 35 and 36 ºC, and the high humidity of the Catalan capital further exacerbates the feeling of suffocation experienced by students and teachers in the building.

The start of classes in Catalonia is fast approaching. We review the key dates for the 2025-2026 school year, which is marked by a significant drop in student numbers in the region's schools and secondary schools and a complete ban on cell phones in classrooms.

Since France questioned the presence of mobile phones in classrooms in 2018, we've looked to it as a pioneering example of digital education. Last year, they piloted a "daily digital break" during school hours in more than 200 schools, and next year it will be extended to all students under 16. Mobile phones will not be allowed in any French classroom, nor in the UK.a studyfrom the University of Birmingham concludes that banning screen time alone does not improve children's well-being or increase academic performance, reducing daily screen time by only 30 minutes.

The school year has started relatively calmly in nursery and primary schools (no strikes and, in the end, sufficient activity leaders in most cases) and the same thing is expected to happen from Wednesday in secondary schools, which also start the year earlier than usual. Complaints focus on two issues: the heat in schools, which are poorly conditioned for high temperatures; and unfinished building works, which affect various schools.