Catalonia was warned seven times to correct the error in the PISA tests

BarcelonaThe Minister of Education Esther Niubó presented this Monday the conclusions of the preliminary investigations opened following the PISA fiasco: Catalonia excluded more students than permitted, which invalidates its results in the OECD tests. Specifically, 23% of the students in the sample were discarded when the OECD stipulates that the maximum number of exempt students cannot exceed 5%.

Now, Education has made public the results of the investigation it opened a few months ago to clarify the errors behind this debacle. Among the conclusions of these investigations is that the National Institute for Educational Evaluation (INEE) warned Catalonia up to seven times that there were errors in the student sample. According to Niubó, these warnings were sent to the Superior Council for the Evaluation of the Educational System of Catalonia—the body responsible at the time for coordinating the tests, which no longer exists— in April 2025, when Catalonia could still have corrected the situation to avoid exclusion. A priori, the Council informed the INEE that it was forwarding this information to the schools to rectify the situation, but the preliminary investigation has found no evidence that this was ever done.

At the press conference, the minister reiterated several times that if these warnings had been heeded, there would still have been time to resolve the percentage of excluded students or attempt some form of retesting the following month.

In fact, Niubó also detailed that the errors had already arisen earlier. The preliminary investigations concluded that when the meeting was held with the 50 schools chosen to take the PISA tests, it was not explicitly explained that the maximum number of students who could be excluded could not exceed 5%. The department described that "the information provided was correct, but incomplete" and stated that these instructions depended on the INEE and the company managing the OECD tests.

Responsibilities and disciplinary proceedings

Niubó has described the PISA fiasco as "very serious", has admitted that the department must take responsibility, and has announced a change at the top of Education, specifically her second-in-command. The minister is thus replacing the person who had been the department's general secretary since the beginning of the legislature, Teresa Sambola, and on Tuesday will announce the name of her replacement.

Furthermore, as a result of the proceedings, three disciplinary proceedings will also be initiated for the error in the OECD tests. One of the proceedings is opened against a senior official of the Department of Education for a minor offense of "omissions that constitute carelessness or negligence in fulfilling established obligations." The other two are opened for serious offenses against two officials of the now-defunct High Council for Evaluation of Catalonia "for an alleged breach of their obligations and duties as public officials." None of these three professionals are still active.

Meetings with unions before the strike

Regarding the start-of-term strike, Niubó admitted that it will not be the start they would have "wanted": "There is a strike call on the first day, despite the agreements reached last year," lamented the minister, who has once again asked for responsibility from teachers so that it is not the students "who pay the price." Niubó said, however, that this week they will meet with all the unions on the sectoral table, as well as "separately" with the two unions calling the strike: USTEC — the majority one — and CGT (the Intersindical also calls it, but is not part of the table). All this to "try" to reach an agreement so that the stoppage on September 8 is called off. In parallel, the head of Education will also meet this week with school principals and families.

Beyond PISA and the strike, the minister also referred to other start-of-term novelties that the Government has already been revealing in recent weeks, such as 500 new support classroom allocations, a pilot test of a manager to assist school leadership, or a guide with orientations on how students should use AI.