The new Baccalaureate of Excellence, under debate: "Schools will compete to get students into it"

PalmaSeparating students with the best grades from the rest of the students to create an Excellence Baccalaureate track. This is the bet of the Ministry of Education and Universities for the 2026-2027 academic year, which has raised alarms among pedagogues, teachers, and families, who see it as a new step towards educational segregation and a model that questions the idea of inclusive education promoted in recent years. 'Excellent' students must coexist with the rest, because society is like that: diverse,” summarizes Joan Jordi Muntaner, doctor in Pedagogy from the UIB. “Contact, relationship, and exchange with diverse people enriches, because the 'good ones' are a model for the rest. Grouping students just because they have very high performance, is that the only objective?” he asks. With this Baccalaureate comes a new form of student segregation, which is added to the linguistic one and to the one that will occur with the implementation of the single zone in most of the municipalities of the Balearic Islands.

The new program will start with 130 places distributed among Mallorca, Menorca, and Ibiza. The new IES Llorenç Villalonga that will be installed in Sa Riera will concentrate the majority of the offer with 70 places and two lines of first-year Baccalaureate. In Menorca there will be an excellence classroom with 30 places, and in Ibiza another one, also with 30 places.

The Ministry defends the project as a response to stimulate talent and effort and to offer more in-depth training to students with better performance, but when asked about the Government's support for promoting it, the institution questions whether anyone's support is needed. The decree establishes a methodology based on research, critical reflection, and autonomous work, with laboratory practices, essay writing, and an environment similar to higher education. In this first phase, the modalities of Science and Technology, and Humanities and Social Sciences can be studied, with the forecast of incorporating the Arts modality later. It is foreseen that young people can study two itineraries at the same time. The Community of Madrid, Aragon, and Castile and Leon, among other autonomous communities, have more or less similar programs. Isabel Ayuso's Programa de Excelencia en Bachillerato is, in any case, the most similar to what the Balearic Islands are promoting.

Knowledge and competition

There are brilliant students who see real opportunities in it. Fèlix Coll, a former student of IES Biel Martí in Ferreries and one of the best grades in the 2025 selectivity, with a 9.35 unweighted, considers that the program can be “a good idea, especially regarding learning and expanding knowledge”. “Having the option to deepen subjects, do laboratory practices, and have the possibility of pursuing a double modality is an opportunity that enriches a lot and can open more doors for the university future”, he states. “I would have liked to have such an option”, he says.

However, the same student also introduces nuances. “Bachillerato, and especially the second year, is already a very intense stage”, he warns. “If you want to get high grades to enter the degree you wish to pursue, the pressure is already enormous”. For this reason, he doubts how the increase in demands will fit with the competition for cut-off grades. “I am not very clear if adding more content and more demands would really help to raise grades or if, even, it could generate even more stress for students”, he says.

The program's philosophy divides the educational community. “It is an old and conservative idea, which starts from the idea that ‘the good with the good work better’, which is not necessarily true”, states Muntaner. “Real enrichment comes from contact with diverse people”. The pedagogue even questions the need for a separate itinerary. “These students have already demonstrated cognitive and work capacity. If during ESO they have already shown excellent competencies, special treatment is not necessary. They will also be excellent later on. Deepening should be done at university, not at Baccalaureate”, he concludes.

The awardees and the best grades

The program access system establishes a clear filter. Priority will be given to students who win the new Extraordinary ESO awards, a call that the Ministry is promoting for the first time. The tests will be held on May 28 and will include four exams: mathematics, English, historical commentary in Catalan, and scientific commentary in Spanish. To participate, students must have completed all of ESO in the Spanish state, be enrolled in the fourth year of ESO in the Balearic Islands, and have a minimum grade of 9.35 in the third year of ESO. The eight best students will receive 500 euros. After the awardees, students who have obtained at least an 8 in the tests will be able to access, and finally those who have a minimum average of 8 in the fourth year of ESO.

In the Pitiuses, the debate incorporates a territorial dimension. Francisco Tienda, director of IES Quartó de Portmany and president of the Association of Directors of Secondary Education and Special Regimes of the Pitiuses, explains that they have already received inquiries from families interested in the Extraordinary awards and in the new itinerary. "We have explained to them that it is designed for students with a high academic record and that they will work with methodologies more typical of university. However, when they saw that this implies going to another center, they did not like it very much," he says.

The debate arrives at a particularly complex moment for public education, with high ratios and structural lack of resources

Criticisms extend beyond academic criteria and point to a structural effect: the reproduction of inequalities. “Which students will be able to access these grades? Which socio-family environment truly facilitates achieving these results?”, asks Kiko López, president of the UCTAIB's Teaching sector. “In reality, it deepens social inequalities”, he opines. Another fact that worries some subsidized schools is that they may lose students, because they need to maintain minimum ratios to keep the concerts and receive public money. However, the position of subsidized schools is not unified: The Confederation of Teaching Centers (CECEIB), which represents more than twenty Subsidized Centers (SC) celebrates “any measure that rewards excellence” and asks that, if the project works well in public schools, it should then be transferred to subsidized centers.

On the other hand, López warns of the risk of consolidating an elitist logic within the educational system. “There will be families who think their children are wasting their time in ordinary classrooms and need specific attention”, he says. “An elite is being fostered that could perhaps be trained equally in the private sector, but is now being financed with public money”, he adds. For the cooperatives' representative, the key is the very meaning of inclusive education. “The basis of inclusive education is not this”, he defends. “Real inclusion is being in diverse and representative contexts of today's society, not inside bubbles”.

And the structural problems?

The debate arrives at a particularly complex moment for public education, with high ratios and a structural lack of resources. “I would accept an ultra-demanding and segregating Baccalaureate if, among many other things, we had adequate ratios and good guidance services with sufficient staff beforehand,” states Professor Tonina Siquier, from IES Sineu. “This year I have 29 students in first year of ESO, and that is a lot. What can I really do to attend to all the different cases? Very little, if anything,” she laments.

Siquier places the conflict in political priorities. “When all this is resolved, then we can talk about Llorenç Villalonga. But while they come with measures to favor those who are already doing well because public education is degraded… then it is worth remembering that public education is degraded precisely because the Ministry does not allocate the necessary resources to it. We do all we can,” she argues.

The consulted sources see in the project a possible step towards a dual educational system. “It will generate competition between schools to place their students there,” warns Siquier. “Education should not go this way. It should be about reducing school dropout and attending to everyone well, not about having four students who end up going to Llorenç Villalonga”. And he adds: “All schools like to send many students to Selectividad and have honors. There are institutes that go crazy with this, imagine if they now open another battlefield to place students in an elite center,” he explains.

Schools seek excellence

Families also express doubts regarding this issue. Xavier Ferriol is president of FAPA Mallorca and of the Apima of IES Joan Alcover, one of the schools in Palma that has traditionally yielded the best academic results. He describes what could happen with a comparison: "It's as if we were a ship that works and they put another one next to us that steals our crew members," he says. Ferriol questions the purpose of the project. "What's happening? Don't the rest of the schools seek excellence? Are they mediocre? That's what is implied," he laments. He also warns that the project is born without a defined educational project.

The defenders of the program (the PP, Vox, and CECEIB, among others) argue that it can prevent demotivation of students with higher performance within the ordinary system. But critics consider that the problem is not the neglect of excellence, but the lack of general resources for the entire system. "Fortunately, there are many good students and not all of them will be able to enter, and they will remain with us," celebrates Siquier.

To understand the background of the debate, we must move beyond the specific case and shift the perspective. “What is being proposed is not the same as separating students with disabilities, which everyone would see as wrong, but it follows a logic of segregation,” states Muntaner. The debate, he says, is not about what we want to protect –talent, rigor, or performance–, but about what model of school is being built when itineraries that separate begin to be drawn. “When we talk about excellence, everyone says they want it. But this separation is not necessarily positive either for those who supposedly have it or for an educational system that is already very affected by structural problems.” The question that remains open is whether this new approach will serve to strengthen education or, on the contrary, to draw a new invisible line of socioeconomic segregation in an already very collapsed educational context.