The Education Department will conduct an external evaluation of students finishing primary school.

PalmThe Regional Ministry of Education will conduct an external evaluation of a sample of schools and students completing sixth grade this year to determine their level of curricular achievement in mathematical and linguistic competence—in Catalan, Spanish, and English. The test will be carried out in parallel with the national assessment promoted by the National Institute for Educational Evaluation (INEE), which will also be conducted on a sample of sixth-grade students from across the country—evaluating linguistic communication and STEM skills (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematicians), multilingualism and digital competence.

The initiative was published in the BOIB (Official Gazette of the Balearic Islands) on Saturday and proposes a "more complete and contextualized" view of students' level at the end of the stage. The regional assessment will allow for "detecting inequalities in competence achievement between territories and types of schools" and will guide evidence-based educational policies.

Approximately 51 schools, selected through random sampling, will participate in the assessment, representing around 76 class groups. The sample will be representative by island and school type (public or private-subsidized), and to ensure confidentiality, schools in Ibiza and Formentera will be grouped together. Each selected school must participate in all phases of the process and may have one or two groups assessed. External personnel appointed by the Institute for Evaluation and Quality of the Education System (IAQSE) and the Department of Educational Inspection (DIE) will conduct the tests, which will take place between April 27 and 30, 2026, in the early morning. One competency will be assessed per day.

• April 27: English
• April 28: Catalan
• April 29: Math
• April 30: Castilian

This schedule may only be modified in exceptional cases, with prior authorization from the IAQSE and the DIE. The tests will be administered on paper, will have a maximum duration of sixty minutes, and will be supplemented with context questionnaires for students, families, teachers, and school administrators to provide context for the results.

Functions and Participants

The IAQSE will be responsible for planning, coordinating, and analyzing the entire process. Participating schools will have to form an evaluation committee to organize the tests, manage communication with families, and coordinate with external evaluators. School administrations will be responsible for safeguarding the tests until they are administered and, where applicable, for validating the personnel who will act as graders or examiners.

The examiners will be teachers from public schools who will administer the tests to schools other than their own. The teachers who mark the tests will be responsible for coding (assigning codes to student responses and results so they can be recorded, analyzed, and processed anonymously) and entering the data into the IAQSE platform. In both cases, the selection will be made by lottery or appointment from among the teachers at the schools. The markers must be employed until at least July 31, 2026, and the data coding must be completed before June 8, 2026.

The assessment will take into account the characteristics of students with special educational needs (SEN). Schools will have adapted general entrance exams, and in cases where a student is two or more years behind in their studies, these students will not be included in their results. It is also anticipated that students who enroll late and do not have sufficient proficiency in one of the official languages will be able to take the Mathematics test in the most appropriate language, or be exempt from a language test.

The data collected will be used to contextualize and analyze student performance, without creating school rankings. The IAQSE will prepare a technical report for the education authorities, with results broken down by island, school type, gender, and other contextual factors. This report should serve to guide pedagogical and strategic decisions and improve the quality and equity of the Balearic education system. The participation of the examining teachers will be on a temporary assignment basis, while the sample test writers and graders will be paid for their work outside of regular working hours.

In the right direction, but with room for improvement

Although these tests are not administered in sixth grade, the results of the 2024-2025 IAQSE tests (which assess the same skills) for fourth grade have shown improvement compared to the previous year, although they remain very low. Students scored an additional 2.5 points in English; 7 in Spanish; 5 in Catalan (after dropping 10 points last year); and 4.5 in mathematics. However, the breakdown by island highlights a worrying situation for the Catalan language. While in Mallorca the level of Catalan increased by 6.7 points—reaching 56.6% proficiency—in Menorca it fell by 8 points (47%), despite being the island with, in theory, the most favorable sociolinguistic context. In Ibiza and Formentera, the drop was 4.9 points, to 33.1%, starting from already very low results.

The breakdown by island again highlights the very different educational realities in the Balearic Islands. Regarding Spanish, proficiency improves by 10.5 points in Mallorca and 6.5 in Ibiza and Formentera, but drops by 27.8 points in Menorca. A similar situation exists in English: it rises by 2.1 points in Mallorca and 13.2 in Menorca, while it falls by 3.7 points in the Pitiusas Islands. In mathematics, the results are also uneven: they increase by 4.9 points in Mallorca and 9.9 in Menorca, but decline slightly, by half a point, in Ibiza and Formentera.