The Balearic Islands received 3,801 new students with the 2025-2026 academic year already underway

PalmaSchools and high schools in the Balearic Islands do not only have to absorb the students who enroll before the school year begins. Every year, thousands of new students arrive in classrooms with the school year already underway, a reality that the Minister of Education, Antoni Vera, admitted this Monday puts the educational system "under tension". During the presentation of the 2026-2027 school year, Vera explained that last school year there were 3,801 new enrollments during the year, from students who joined once classes had already started.

“Every year there are more students joining during the school year,” pointed out the minister, who remarked that this is a phenomenon that forces the Administration to incorporate resources throughout the year. “There are students who come mid-year and do not finish it either,” noted Vera, who admitted that this mobility generates added pressure on an educational system that must respond to needs that cannot always be foreseen before September.

The situation has an especially relevant dimension when students arrive from other educational systems. As the minister explained, among these students there are also Unaccompanied Foreign Minors (UFM), who join the Balearic educational system once the school year has already begun. In these cases, the difficulty is not only finding a school place, but ensuring that the student can adapt to the educational level, the language, and the functioning of the system in a short time. Vera focused especially on adolescents aged 16 and 17, because joining at these ages can make it difficult for them to remain in the educational system. “If they are 16 or 17-year-olds, it is hard to retain them in the educational system if they have already passed the compulsory schooling age,” he warned.

Leaders in foreign students

The figure of 3,801 incorporations during the academic year is part of a trend that has already been especially visible in recent years. The number of late-enrolling students registered by the Education department went from 1,297 students in the 2021-2022 academic year to 6,814 in 2025-2026, an increase of 425%, while the total student body only grew by 4.9% in the same period. The phenomenon is also related to the growing weight of students of foreign origin. According to the data provided this Monday by Vera, 19% of the student body in the Balearic Islands is foreign, the highest percentage of all the autonomous communities. The minister compared the figure with that of the Valencian Community (18%), Catalonia (16.5%), the Canary Islands (12.8%), and Extremadura (4.5%).

Given this reality, the Department of Education maintains that the Balearic Islands must provide their own resources to respond to these sudden arrivals. Vera has announced that this academic year there will be 1,582 students in the Linguistic and Cultural Reception Program (PALIC), 385 more than the previous year. The program allows for specific support to be given to newly arrived students who are still in the process of acquiring the language and adapting to the education system. The Department of Education had already increased the hours allocated to PALIC last year to strengthen this reception.

Vera has argued, in this regard, that the increase in students arriving during the school year makes it necessary to reinforce both the number of teachers and the resources for diversity support. "We are committed to more teachers, more diversity support staff," she stated. The pressure, therefore, does not stem only from how many students the system has, but from how and when they arrive. The Balearic Islands will begin this school year with 158,859 students, a figure lower than the 161,201 of the previous year, but the Department of Education will have to continue managing throughout the school months the arrival of students who are not part of the initial enrollment snapshot and who may require a specific response.