The Catalan PISA fiasco is not just a statistical error. It is an educational paradox. When almost one in every four selected students is left out of a test that is supposed to portray the system, the problem is not only that the sample ceases to be reliable. The problem is what this exclusion reveals about our way of understanding inclusion.An inclusive school cannot demonstrate its inclusion by excluding from evaluation the students who most reveal their limits.Catalonia has participated in PISA for years, and the Administration was aware of the criteria, the procedure, and the importance of preserving the representativeness of the sample. It is not enough to talk about a confusion: it must be explained why no control mechanism stopped a deviation of this magnitude. There are, of course, exceptional cases where a student cannot take a test like PISA under valid conditions. But when the exception extends to leaving out almost a quarter of the sample, we are no longer just talking about a technical problem. We are talking about a diagnosis that has ceased to represent the classrooms it intended to evaluate.Students with cognitive, emotional, behavioral, or linguistic difficulties are not an anomaly of the system. They are the system. We cannot consider them fully included if they stop being counted when we evaluate what the school achieves. A common confusion arises here: confusing inclusion with protection. Protecting a student from a situation they truly cannot face may be necessary. But interpreting difficulties too broadly as a reason not to assess them is another matter. It may seem compassionate, but it can lower expectations and avoid the more uncomfortable question: what has this student learned and what has the system failed to offer them? Stopping the questions is not inclusion. What is not evaluated does not disappear. It simply stops engaging us. If the most vulnerable students are left out of the sample, the picture may be more comfortable, but it is less honest. It no longer explains what the school is doing with the student body as a whole, but only with those we have considered more easily assessable.

Let's talk about the PISA tests, after this error that (fortunately) leaves Catalonia out of comparisons. In order to assess the level – or if you prefer level, competencies– of the students, from each community the institutes are chosen, and once the institutes are chosen, the students, just like when political surveys are done. Because in surveys, in sampling, that thing of “Spain is one and not fifty-one".

This is the last analysis of the season and, therefore, it is time to take stock. If we talk about moods, we arrive at the holidays worried because many folders have not been closed: the amnesty has not yet reached the exiles or the main disqualified individuals, the new financing system is very slow, almost as slow as the improvement of the Rodalies service or the Adif works, and the education system in Catalonia, which left for the holidays amidst strikes and will begin equally amidst protests, has hit rock bottom with the discrediting of the Department of Education and the lamentable final episode of the PISA tests. It only remains for us to know that the ministry warned the department in April 2025 (and not, as had been said, in March 2026), that there was a very high student exclusion rate, but the warning went from technicians to technicians and they did not communicate it to the top of the political sphere. Why? It is not known and this fuels suspicions that since the results of the tests would be very bad, no one wanted to take responsibility for the hot potato. In fact, the explanations were given at the end of July, late and poorly, and it is all a jumble of inconcisions about departments that were being reformed or the coincidence with other tests. All this does not generate confidence.It has been a year of protests in education, healthcare, and farming. Social discontent related to the loss of purchasing power has continued to grow. Because unemployment has fallen to pre-2008 crisis levels and everyone has a job, but salaries don't cover the end of the month. Housing is a pipe dream, while we hear about the construction of thousands of social and affordable rental apartments by the Generalitat. To be fair, these are measures that can generate a sustained supply for all budgets, but of course, apartments are not built overnight.We are checking the effects of the enormous demographic growth that Catalonia has experienced in the last 25 years. Those of us who are of a certain age still remember the announcement of "we are 6 million", and today we have already passed 8 and some are talking about 10. The seams of the country have burst everywhere and subsumed by common regime autonomous policies, we do not have the necessary fiscal and budgetary sovereignty to make a country tailor-made for us. That state investments in Catalonia in 2025 were 8.6% is outrageous. A consequence of this panorama is the electoral boom that Catalan Alliance will experience next year in the municipal elections according to all the polls, a boom that would announce a surpassing in the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia which, if not brought forward, would be in the spring of 2028. There is citizen exhaustion, a loss of confidence in the usual parties and leaderships, the ghost of existential linguistic anguish has reappeared and we have not fully recovered from the Process's Dragon Khan. If we add to this the great capacity of the far-right to turn the most primary identity drives into votes, the demographic future indicates that in Catalonia the same thing will end up happening that has already happened in other places in Europe and the world.The country has talent, it retains the knack for doing things well, it has reserves of self-esteem, and it has seen it all to be able to react to adversity. The country is more solid than it currently appears and it falters just as everyone falters. The problem is that it lacks the minimum sovereignty needed to make its own decisions. And for all of this, we go on vacation (and we are thankful for it) knowing that next season we will face the same problems and that the current solutions will fall short.Good summer and see you soon.

Jesús Moral (1959, Còrdova) is a mathematics professor and has worked for almost two decades in the Department of Education. He has been head of the Center Organization service, secretary of the School Council of Catalonia, secretary of the Higher Council for the Evaluation of the Educational System, and deputy director general of Innovation and Training. In 2018, he was part of the department's team responsible for organizing the PISA tests. In a conversation with ARA, he analyzes the error that has invalidated the inclusion of Catalonia's results in the international tests and which, therefore, makes it impossible to compare the level of Catalan students with that of other territories and with previous years.

The Ministry of Education warned the technical services of the Ministry of Education more than a year ago that the OECD had detected a higher exemption rate of Catalan students than permitted in the PISA 2025 tests. While the international organization sets that, in the sample of a territory, the percentage of students exempt from taking the test cannot exceed 5%, in Catalonia this rate soared to 23.3%. As reported by La Vanguardia and confirmed by the ministry in a statement, the warning occurred in April 2025, when the tests were already underway – they were held between March 31 and May 16 – and it was the company in charge of managing their application for the OECD that informed the State of the anomalies.

Finally, yesterday we were able to hear the explanations that the Minister of Education, Esther, Niubó, gave in Parliament about the PISA tests disaster. Her intervention is summarized in this headline:“The Government has not clarified the origin of the PISA tests error”. The minister admitted the error, assumed “its seriousness”, cleared the centers, therefore, accepted that the responsibility lay with the Department of Education, but four months later she still does not know whose it is. And, at most, she ventured a hypothesis: that since on the same dates there were other exams organized by the Department, perhaps the coincidence of days led to the error in the sample.Niubó: “This means that the same 51 educational centers that were PISA samples also had to apply, with very little time difference, two assessments subject to different frameworks, that of PISA and the end-of-stage tests for fourth year of ESO, which, as I said before, were census-based last year and all students took them. And this similarity of percentages, combined with the fact that they were the same centers, with a coinciding schedule, but with different frameworks applied almost at the same time, allows us to suggest that confusion could have been generated at the center about the criteria to be used, transferring to the PISA tests exemption criteria or non-participation practices specific to the Catalan end-of-stage tests. But, I insist, this is a hypothesis.”It is inadmissible that the Government still does not have the conclusions of a problem it was warned about in March. And in this regard, President Illa's comments, who is in Vietnam on an official trip these days, do not help at all. The president said yesterday: "It's not about blaming anyone." President, let's see, we are not playing cards, this is not about blame, but rather we are scrutinizing a serious error that, incidentally, greatly harms the narrative of a government that defined itself by its management (by good management, it is understood) in contrast to the "collision" pro-State independence governments, which were focused on conflict and not on what really matters to people. And when someone makes a serious mistake, it is necessary to identify who has slipped up, who has not done their job well. This talk of blame is a dialectical way out to give the appearance of seriousness to an internal review that is not being very serious because, as I said, four months have passed and all the minister can say is that she is still in the realm of hypotheses. Of course not all of the problems in education in Catalonia are in the department of education, but in view of its limited capacity to deal with them, it is clear that one of the problems in education in Catalonia is the department responsible for it, now and before. And I end up talking about Mallorca. Yesterday we denounced police violence against the protesters of “Less tourism and more life”. There is a painful contrast between civic concern, expressed peacefully, and the abuse of power with which it was met. And on this subject I want to reproduce a fragment of today's article by the Mallorcan Sebastià Alzamora, who says it with much more precise words, as befits someone who lives there:“Mallorcans, as a society, have a certain reputation for being apathetic and conformist. I won't say it's not a reputation that is deserved to some extent, but it has a more interesting flip side. This same society also forms a country of sensible and elegant people, with a deep allergy to bad manners, rudeness, exaggerated gestures, and violence in any form. For the citizens of this country called Mallorca, there are few things less interesting than losing one's temper and irony, becoming overbearing, solemn, or intransigent. And let's not even mention becoming aggressive: all of this, in Mallorca, is frankly frowned upon. If even reasonable proposals, expressed in a civic manner, are met with batons, in the end the government will have nothing left. Because as Alzamora says, “On Sunday, something institutional broke.”Good morning.

Despite being aware of it since March, the Government still does not know how the error occurred that invalidated the inclusion of Catalonia's results in the international PISA tests and, therefore, makes it impossible to compare the level of Catalan students with that of other territories and with previous years. In a parliamentary appearance, the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, admitted this Monday the "gravity" of the situation, but defended that the executive launched an internal process four months ago to gather information and reconstruct the facts with the aim of clarifying the origin of the incident that led the Generalitat to dismiss 23% of students, even though the OECD sets a maximum of 5% for this percentage. The report has not yet been prepared and, therefore, Niubó said that they still have no conclusions on why the high rate of students exempt from taking the exams was not detected in time.

These days we have been surprised by the announcement from the Department of Education according to which the latest PISA results will be published, but they will not be comparable. A technical error is accepted as a reason, stating that the percentage of students excluded from the sample was finally 23%, a figure that far exceeds the 5% considered tolerable.

Salvador Illa teams up with the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, after the Government made public "the error" in the PISA tests. "All the support", expressed the President of the Generalitat from Vietnam, where he is on an official trip. It is the first time that Illa has spoken about this fiasco, which the Department of Education made public on Friday and for which Niubó is scheduled to appear in Parliament on Monday to give explanations. In fact, Illa has assured that the minister will "make things clear" in her appearance. The "technical incident" that the Generalitat spoke about on Friday will not allow Catalonia to compare the results that will be made public in September with other territories or with previous years.

Forceful response from school principals in the face of an error that will make the PISA test results in Catalonia incomparable with other territories or previous years. The association of school principals issued a statement this Saturday in which they blame the error with the tests, warning that it will have a "devastating consequence": "Catalonia loses the possibility of comparing the evolution of its education system with the rest of the world," they warn in the text.

After the most complicated school year in Catalan classrooms, with a final month marked by an unprecedented series of strikes, when practically the entire educational community is already on vacation, a new bucket of cold water arrives. This time on one of the international evaluation pillars. The latest PISA tests taken in Catalonia were a fiasco. It is a real disaster: the selection of students who took them was done incorrectly. In the rest of Spain, it was done correctly.

No matter how you look at it, the fiasco of the Department of Education with the PISA tests cannot be justified: the OECD discovered and communicated the error in March, but the Generalitat has not reported it until now, four months later, on a Friday in late July. But we should not see any will of "concealment" and "manipulation".Even though four months have already passed, some "preliminary informative proceedings of a reserved nature" are still open to find out what might have happened, but it is not ruled out that it may have coincided with another basic competencies exam and with a "transition process" between the old Superior Council of Evaluation and the new Agency for Evaluation and Prospective of Education, and to prevent it from happening again, the Commission for Coordination of Evaluation Tests and Studies has been created.Instead of applying the maximum exclusion rate of 5% of students, a rate of 23.3% was applied, a circumstance that the Director General of Curriculum and Professional Development, who comes out to face the music (and not the minister), describes as an "technical, isolated and isolated incident". Total: the PISA test results that will be published in September will not be comparable with other territories or with other previous years in Catalonia.It is a national and international ridicule for the Generalitat, because Catalonia participates in the OECD's PISA tests with its own sample and because, seeing that in the last exam in 2022 Catalan students were below the average for the OECD, Europe, and Spain, President Illa signed an agreement with the OECD to lift the results. Well, for now, before knowing how the students have done, it is the Catalan administration that has failed. In education, we are playing with the future, and it has been too long since we have been doing well.

Carles Granell is a primary school teacher at the Sant Lluís School in the Prosperidad neighborhood of Barcelona and a professor of mathematics education at the University of Barcelona. He is also a member of the Federation of Mathematics Education Entities of Catalonia (FEEMCAT), which organized the Catalan Congress on Mathematics Education in Lleida last July, where hundreds of teachers analyzed the state of mathematics and how its learning could be improved.