In Ibiza there are more Catalan teachers missing than the island has high schools: "Someone comes and they appoint them 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 in the island's 11 high schools (IES) and 2 at the only Official School of Languages (EOI). The lack of teachers affects the 12 public Secondary and language teaching centers on the island. The Minister of Education, Antoni Vera, acknowledges the magnitude of the problem: "We are aware of the shortage 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 cover the vacancies. If they cannot be filled, the Department plans to convert them into general subject positions, which teachers from other qualifications will be able to opt for, provided they hold the relevant Catalan language certificate. It would not, in any case, be a new situation: in previous academic years, teachers of other specialties, such as Geography and History, have already assumed the teaching of Catalan in Ibizan centers.

The situation in the schools shows how difficult it is to find specialized teachers. Several management teams consulted by this newspaper claim that the problem is so serious that, when a new Catalan teacher arrives, in some schools the situation is extreme: "Someone new arrives and they are made 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 the 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 IAQSE tests for the 2024-2025 academic year 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 regression in Secondary education was accompanied by very low results in Primary school tests. In the fourth grade, only 33.1% of students in the Pityusic Islands achieved a "pass", 4.9 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 these poor results to be attributed directly to the lack of teaching staff, but they do draw an especially worrying scenario for the Catalan language in the Pityusic Islands. While schools have difficulties guaranteeing Catalan language teaching staff, the students' achievement indicators show an especially sharp regression.

Added to this situation is the lesser weight of Catalan in the linguistic choice of families. In early education, 81.8% of families in Mallorca opted for Catalan for 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 education, while 46.7% have opted for Spanish. It is the lowest percentage in the Balearic Islands and evidences that the difficulty in guaranteeing the presence of Catalan in classrooms coincides with a social reality in which the language is also losing weight at an accelerated pace.

More vacancies than schools

The 15 vacancies pending to be filled 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 prevent them from remaining vacant. The conversion into interdisciplinary positions is an emergency solution in the face of a situation that management teams currently consider 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 centers to have stable and sufficiently large teams in this specialty. Two days before the start of the school year, Catalan becomes one of the main educational challenges on the island for the new year, 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.