The opposition asks the Government for a "change of course" in education after the PISA scandal

BarcelonaThe error that invalidates Catalonia's PISA test results for comparison with other territories and previous years continues to cause controversy. This Monday, the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, will appear before Parliament to account for the technical incident that altered the sample — and which will prevent Catalan results from being included in the worldwide report — since, when deciding how many students did not take the tests due to learning difficulties, Catalonia exceeded the limit: the Generalitat ruled out 23% of students, when the OECD sets the maximum number of exemptions at 5%.

While awaiting Niubó's appearance, the spokesperson for Comuns and candidate for mayor of Barcelona, Gerardo Pisarello, has warned the Government that it is "not succeeding" in educational matters, alluding to the error in the PISA report and the protests from teachers this academic year. "The impression all this generates is that the Government is not succeeding and that, therefore, what is needed is a change of course, of policy," Pisarello asserted.

The spokesperson for Junts, Josep Rius, has warned that his party "will go all the way" to clarify the error in the PISA tests. "Minister Niubó is a burnt-out, overwhelmed minister, and has been reprimanded by Parliament," Rius stated at a press conference at Junts headquarters. He also assured that, if the problem is due to a "bureaucratic error," it will be proven that the Government is "incompetent." "If, on top of that, they have hidden it, then that's a serious matter," he added.

On the other hand, the Secretary General of the PPC, Juan Fernández, stated that the incident is not a "simple administrative error or technical incident," but rather demonstrates that, in view of "the evidence of deterioration" in education, the executive "has preferred that Catalans do not know the results." "Illa's government practices the policy of concealment," he stated.

"It's not about blaming anyone"

From the Government, however, they insist on closing ranks with the minister. The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, defended this Monday that "it is not about blaming anyone" for the error in the PISA report, but about clarifying the facts to "prevent it from happening again". He considered this in a press briefing from the Temple of Literature in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he is on an institutional visit. Furthermore, he reiterated his support for Niubó before her appearance.

The spokesperson for the Catalan executive, Sílvia Paneque, also defended the minister. In statements to TV3, the also Minister of Territory, Housing and Ecological Transition defended that the first thing to do in these situations is to provide the relevant explanations. "We must explain exactly what happened and how this can be prevented from happening again. I await these explanations and what the parliamentary groups put on the table. Before asking for resignations, I would like the groups to wait for the explanations. This is what the citizens expect from us," she argued.

From the department, it has been assured that errors like the one that occurred in Catalonia are "a phenomenon that the OECD itself has had to manage on other occasions." In this sense, in the last PISA report of 2022, up to sixteen countries exceeded the threshold of exempt students set by the OECD, but none of them – except Ukraine, which was already in full war and was at 26% exempt – exceeded 11% of excluded students. In other words, the percentage of students that Catalonia has excluded from the PISA exams this year doubles the proportion of the country that exempted the most in the last tests, Denmark.

Representativeness problem

Of the 2,545 15-year-old students who were to participate in Catalonia, 591 were excluded and finally only 1,954 took the test, a deviation that, according to the Director General of Curriculum and Professional Development of the Generalitat, Sònia Fernández, caused "a problem of statistical representativeness". PISA works with a sample of students that must represent the entire 15-year-old population and allows for certain exemptions when a physical, cognitive, behavioral or emotional disability or insufficient language proficiency makes it impossible to properly take the test.

However, these circumstances do not automatically imply exclusion, as each student must be assessed individually according to the severity of their diagnosis. In mild cases or when they can be assessed with appropriate support, the student must participate in the tests. This technical incident meant that the student sample was "valid, but not representative", explained Fernández on Friday.

The results obtained by Catalan students will appear in the state report in September, accompanied by a technical warning, but they cannot be used to draw comparable conclusions about the evolution of Catalonia or with respect to the rest of the communities, thus invalidating their main objective and function. Education has already opened reserved informative proceedings to clarify how the exemption criteria were applied and has created a technical commission that will previously review exclusions in future assessments, something that was not done until now.

It should be noted that the PISA results for 2025 were particularly anticipated after the setback recorded by Catalonia in the previous 2022 edition, which placed its students' performance at historic lows in various competencies, while educational improvement constitutes one of the Government's priorities for this legislature.