In Ibiza there are more Catalan teachers lacking than the island has high schools: "Someone comes and they name him head of department"

PalmaJust two days before the return to the classrooms, Ibiza faces the start of the school year with 15 Catalan teacher positions still unfilled: 13 at the island's 11 high schools (IES) and 2 at the only Official School of Languages (EOI). The shortage of teachers affects the island's 12 public secondary and language schools. The Minister of Education, Antoni Vera, acknowledges the magnitude of the problem: "We are aware of the lack of Catalan teachers in Ibiza".

According to Vera, the Department of Education will try to allow this year's Catalan graduates to apply for positions to fill the vacancies. If they cannot be filled, the Department plans to convert them into cross-disciplinary positions, for which teachers with other degrees will be eligible provided they hold the relevant Catalan language certificate. In any case, this would not be a new situation: in previous school years, teachers of other specialties, such as Geography and History, have already taken on the teaching of Catalan in Ibiza's schools.

The situation in the centers shows to what extent it is difficult to find specialized teachers. Several management teams consulted by this newspaper assure that the problem is so serious that, when a new Catalan teacher arrives, in some centers the situation is extreme: "Someone new arrives and they make them head of department," denounces the president of the Secondary School Principals' Association of the Pitiüses, Francisco Tienda. The lack of teaching staff thus affects not only the coverage of teaching hours, but also the ordinary functioning and structure of the faculty.

A setback of 19.1 points

The shortage of teachers coincides with particularly worrying results for Catalan in the Pityusic Islands. The 2024-2025 IAQSE tests show that second-year ESO students in Ibiza and Formentera lost 19.1 points in Catalan proficiency compared to the previous edition (starting from previous results that were already meager). The decline is part of a generalized setback across all the islands. Students in Mallorca dropped 14.4 points and those in Menorca, 23.5. In the Balearic Islands as a whole, the average drop was 15 points.

In Ibiza and Formentera, the decline in Secondary Education was accompanied by very low results in Primary school tests. In fourth grade, only 33.1% of students in the Pityusic Islands achieved a "pass," 4.9 percentage points less than the previous year. It is the worst result in the Balearic Islands as a whole. Mallorca, on the other hand, improved by 6.7 points, to 56.6%, while Menorca fell by eight points, to 47%. The data do not allow for directly attributing these poor results to a lack of teaching staff, but they do draw an especially worrying scenario for Catalan in the Pityusic Islands. While schools have difficulties guaranteeing Catalan language teaching staff, the students' achievement indicators show an especially sharp decline.

Added to this situation is the lower weight of Catalan in the linguistic choice of families. In early childhood education, 81.8% of families in Mallorca opted for Catalan in the 2026-2027 academic year, a percentage that reaches 82.5% in Formentera. In Menorca, on the other hand, the proportion rises to 89.7%. The case of Ibiza is especially significant: only 53.3% of families have chosen Catalan as the language of early childhood education, while 46.7% have opted for Spanish. It is the lowest percentage in the Balearic Islands and shows that the difficulty in guaranteeing the presence of Catalan in classrooms coincides with a social reality in which the language is also losing ground at an accelerated rate.

More vacant places than schools

The 15 pending vacancies affect a relatively small educational structure: 9 high schools (IES) and 1 official language school (EOI). The Department of Education trusts that the incorporation of this year's Catalan graduates will allow for a reduction in the number of positions without a teacher, but it already anticipates resorting to teachers from other specialties to avoid vacancies. The conversion into interdisciplinary positions is an emergency exit in the face of a situation that management teams consider, for the moment, exceptional, but which runs the risk of becoming structural in a few years: Ibiza does not graduate the teachers it needs. And those from Mallorca do not want to go there due to the problems in finding housing.

The problem is not just quantitative. The fact that a teacher who has just arrived may have to directly assume the leadership of the Catalan department highlights the difficulty for schools to have stable and sufficiently large teams in this specialty. Two days before the start of the school year, Catalan becomes one of the island's main educational challenges for the new term, in a context also marked by structural problems that affect the Balearic Islands as a whole, but which manifest with special intensity in the Pityusic Islands.