School principals say the PISA test error is "devastating"

BarcelonaForceful 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.

They consider it even more serious that the "possibility of rigorously evaluating whether the educational policies implemented in response to the poor PISA 2022 results have had any effect is lost," and question how no one detected this error in the index of students exempt from taking the tests. "There are errors that compromise the credibility of an institution and leave a country without one of the basic tools for understanding reality. This is exactly what has happened with PISA 2025 in Catalonia," they state in the communiqué.

The school principals demand that the department "explain what happened, identify the causes, assume the corresponding responsibilities, and, above all, guarantee that it will not happen again." In fact, as ARA has learned, the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, plans to appear before Parliament on Monday, pending official confirmation from the chamber.

Furthermore, the directors criticize that they have not been informed of the situation and that they found out through the media at the end of July. "Once again, the focus is placed on the centers and the managements, who end up being pointed out as responsible for a problem that goes far beyond our scope of action. Does anyone believe that 51 centers have made a mistake at the same time?", their statement questions.

Confirmed "a few weeks ago"

Education announced the error this Friday, at the end of July, even though it had already received an alert about the error in March, according to the department itself. This Saturday, however, the secretary for educational improvement of the Department of Education, Ignasi Giménez, has qualified the timeline and stated that they did not have confirmation of the error in the PISA tests sample "until relatively few weeks ago".

Giménez explained in statements to RAC1 that the Ministry of Education communicated to them in March that this incident could have occurred, but that confirmation did not arrive until later. Furthermore, he defended that once they had confirmation that there had been a deficient selection in the sample of students who were to take the tests, Education opened a procedure to "seek all the necessary information to clarify" the case.

He added that they also verified that in the three evaluation tests that had been carried out this academic year, this had not happened and that the applied criteria "very clearly comply with what is set by the evaluation framework for each one". During his intervention, Giménez absolved the centers' teaching staff of responsibility and pointed to a "confusion" with the student exemption criteria, taking into account that in the same period of time other evaluation tests were being carried out – those at the end of the 4th year of ESO stage – with different criteria.

The secretary insisted that the sample of centers participating in the tests is not chosen by the department or the Ministry of Education, but by the OECD. The error that will not allow the results in Catalonia to be compared is related to the exemption index, that is, to the percentage of students who, due to disability or lack of knowledge of the language, did not have to take the PISA exams. The OECD sets the percentage of exempt students at 5%, and in the 2025 tests in Catalonia, this percentage soared to 23.2%.

Giménez insisted that even though the results will not be comparable, the sample "is reliable" and will appear in the report of the state results. "It is not that the results of Catalan students have been excluded," he stated.