This Friday, the Department of Education communicated that, due to an error, Catalonia's results in the PISA tests will not be valid for comparison with other territories nor with Catalan results from previous years. The reason is that when deciding how many students did not take the tests due to learning difficulties, Catalonia exceeded the limit: it discarded 23% of the students in the sample when the OECD marks that the maximum number of exempted students cannot exceed 5%.

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.

This Friday, the Government announced that an error in the sample of selected students has resulted in Catalonia's PISA test results being invalidated for comparison with other territories or previous years. The error by Education means that the sample is not representative and it will not be possible to know if the Catalan educational level has improved or worsened. L'ARA interviews Francesc Pedró, who has worked for a decade with the OECD in the educational field. He is also a professor at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and co-director of the 2026 Yearbook of Education in Catalonia from the Equitat.org Foundation.

The Catalan education system has experienced a real upheaval: an error in the sample of students who took the PISA tests will make Catalonia's results in the OECD tests unrepresentative and incomparable with the scores of other countries or with the results that Catalan students achieved in previous editions. In other words, the PISA tests will not serve to know if Catalan schools have improved or worsened compared to the last report in 2022, which was a disaster for Catalonia, nor to know the level of Catalan students compared to that of boys and girls from other territories. Broadly speaking, the problem is that there was an error in deciding which students should be excluded from the tests due to learning difficulties: Catalonia exempted 23% of the students who were part of the sample, when the OECD sets a maximum of 5% of participants to be exempted. But what is the process for deciding which adolescents take the PISA tests?

Serious setback in the Catalan education system. The results of the PISA tests in Catalonia, which will be made public in early September, will not be comparable with other territories or with previous years' editions. In other words, the PISA report will not allow us to see if the level of Catalan students has improved or worsened. The reason is what the Department of Education has described as a "technical, isolated, and isolated incident." Broadly speaking, Catalonia has not correctly applied the criteria set by the OECD – the initiators of the PISA tests – to justify that a student should not undergo the tests, which has resulted in the sample of students who did take the exams not being representative of Catalan students aged 15. The Government received an alert about the error in March and communicated it this Friday, July 24. An investigation has been opened to clarify the causes of this fiasco.

With two months to go until the results of a new PISA report are known – the exams that sounded all the alarms about the level of Catalan students in 2023 – the OECD presented its analysis of the Catalan education system this Monday. A report that Salvador Illa's government asked the OECD a year and a half ago with the aim of finding the longed-for recipe to improve educational results. Although the recipe is new, the ingredients are well known: more inclusion of diversity within the classroom, incentives in the teaching career, strengthening of the role of management, and a "coherent" and aligned evaluation.

"We need the curriculum to tell teachers how to detect if a student will have reading problems." This warning from school principal Francesc Martín, which may seem obvious, is one of the main obstacles to improving reading comprehension results in Catalonia. This is the conclusion of the study. Reading comprehension: the pending subject, presented this Monday by the Bofill Foundation.

The regional minister for Education, Esther Niubó, had already warned that the results of this year's basic skills tests – now known as end-of-year assessments – would not be entirely good, and so it has been: the math level of 6th grade primary school students is the lowest in the history of the basic skills tests, which began to be held in 2010. This year, the average math grade of 6th grade students was a mere pass (70.4 points, when it is considered that to reach competence one must reach at least 70), the drop of almost four points compared to last year's results has meant that the math level of students who have finished school this year and are now starting. Similarly, in 6th grade, the level in science, technology and engineering is also very worrying, the only skill where the average has failed after falling from 74.3 points last year to 66.3 this year.

New measures announced to try to improve the math and language skills of Catalan students. After noting a "significant drop in the results of Catalan students in linguistic and mathematical competence," in the words of the Government itself, this Thursday the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, presented the Framework for the Improvement of Language and Mathematics. The plan that Niubó explained from the Pau Casals School in Sabadell is a compilation of all the measures that have already been implemented in recent government courses, added to new actions that must be implemented in the coming months. All of this will have a budget of 129.3 million euros for the period 2025-2028 with the aim of "students leaving behind this very dark period in educational results," in the words of the Minister of Education, of actions to improve evaluation or make it more precise. "If we don't fully understand what's happening, we can't know how to act. The measures taken must be based on robust information," Niubó argued. That's why the Government intends to conduct a "more surgical" assessment, focusing on strengthening the inspections of schools and institutes, so that school administrators and inspectors from the Territorial Services can identify the weak points in the education system. "It's true that many operate on their own, but perhaps some need more tutoring," Niubó acknowledged. This reinforcement will be implemented in a pilot phase next academic year, 2025-2026, and the intention is to extend it for four years. However, at this point, the plan does not foresee hiring new inspectors. Educational inequalities. In this sense, the Education Ministry wants to reorient the training provided in the Educational Environment Plans of each municipality to offer free math and language reinforcement for vulnerable students, and robotics workshops.

This Monday begins one of the most decisive weeks for the Catalan education system. Although for students, basic skills tests are just another exam—in fact, the Catalan government makes it clear that these tests do not affect a student's final assessment or determine whether or not they pass a particular educational stage—when it comes down to it, they are the main indicator of how effective the measures applied in Catalan schools are.

One of the first measures that the then Education Minister Anna Simó announced after the Catalan disaster in the PISA tests It was a seemingly simple action: specifying the minimum learning levels that Catalan students should achieve at each educational level. Despite the apparent simplicity of the measure—and the surprise at the necessity of it—in reality, these specifications have taken two years to reach the schools and institutes of Catalonia.