The PISA results portray an educational system in permanent storm: it is not one column that is shaking, but the entire building

PalmaThe Balearic Islands obtain worse results than Spain, the European Union average, and the OECD in the three competencies evaluated by the PISA report corresponding to the tests conducted in 2025. The picture is especially worrying in Reading Comprehension, where the Islands fall to 441 points, 31 fewer than in 2022, but the decline is also notable in Mathematics, with 449 points (-22), and in Science, with 471 (-9). In tests where a difference of 20 points is approximately equivalent to one academic year, the magnitude of the drop is difficult to ignore. More than half of the students do not reach, for example, level 2 of scientific competence, the threshold that PISA considers basic. The data, by themselves, do not explain why this is happening. But they do force us to look at what has changed inside the classrooms and also outside of them.

Because today's students are not the same as those from ten or fifteen years ago. Classrooms are more diverse, there are more students arriving into the education system during the school year, more situations of socioeconomic vulnerability, and also new learning and information consumption habits. During the 2025-2026 school year, 3,801 newly arrived students were incorporated into the schools of the Balearic Islands. It is not a figure that allows us to attribute poor results to them (that would be a conclusion as easy as it is wrong), but it does describe a reality that schools must absorb, often with limited resources and an added difficulty: teaching and assessing students who may not yet master the language in which they are being taught (neither Spanish nor, of course, Catalan).

The PISA tests confirm a significant difference between native and immigrant students. Before taking into account the socioeconomic situation, the gap is around 48 points. However, when the effect of the socioeconomic level is discounted, it is reduced to about 29 points. This is significant because it indicates that a meaningful part of the differences does not simply have to do with the student's origin, but with the conditions in which they live and study. And here another of the great problems of the Balearic Islands appears: the socioeconomic level of the students is lower than the Spanish, European, and OECD average.

Failing, complicated

The point is that this reality coincides with a profound transformation in the way of teaching. The LOMLOE has introduced an evaluation and promotion model in which the student's competencies and progress have a central weight. Repeating a year has become an exceptional measure and the decisions on promotion and graduation depend on a global assessment of the competencies and the objectives of the stage. This does not mean that a student can automatically graduate with serious shortcomings in any subject, but it does mean that the system has left behind a conception more based on the number of failed subjects and on repetition as a correction mechanism. Teachers indicate that they have felt belittled by other colleagues in the faculty when they have decided to fail a student, as if it were something serious to tell a family that their child does not meet the minimum level of a subject.

This change has been heavily questioned by a part of the teaching staff, who consider that the assessment has moved too far away from the concrete knowledge that the student is capable of demonstrating. It is also here that one of the underlying discussions that the PISA results bring back to the table appears: to what extent can an education based on competencies be developed if students do not have a solid base of knowledge upon which to build them?

The response from Antoni Vera's Department of Education is already underway. The Government has made an explicit shift towards reinforcing basic learning and has reclaimed knowledge as one of the pillars of the curriculum. The new curricula have increased the weight of Mathematics and languages, have significantly reduced the hours of free disposition in Primary Education, and have also reinforced Environmental Knowledge. In Secondary Education, Mathematics will now have four weekly hours in all ESO years. The Department has also limited the use of screens: individual use is not permitted in Preschool or the first three years of Primary Education, and in the fourth year, it is limited to one hour per day. Vera has defined this as a commitment to recover a solid base of knowledge and return it to the center of teaching.

It is too early, however, to know if this bet will work. The new curricula began to be rolled out in the 2025-2026 academic year and the students who have followed them have not yet gone through the entire educational system. The PISA results that we know now are, therefore, largely a snapshot of a set of previous models and at least two state educational laws of different political stripes. If the Ministry is right and recovering hours of Mathematics, reinforcing reading and writing, giving more weight to content, and limiting screens really improves learning, PISA will not be able to demonstrate it from one year to the next. It will take years to know if this bet yields results.

And here is one of the most interesting questions that the data puts on the table. For years, the educational debate has often revolved around whether it was necessary to abandon traditional formulas and move towards more competency-based methodologies, more projects, more digital tools, and an evaluation less focused on exams. Now, however, the Balearic Islands find themselves with a generation that has grown up surrounded by screens, social networks, short videos, and constant stimuli that have undermined their capacity for concentration and attention. It cannot be claimed that this alone explains the PISA decline, because the data do not allow for that relationship to be established. But neither can a question that is increasingly present among teachers and families be ignored: what is this permanent exposure doing to the capacity for concentration, long-form reading, complex writing, and sustained effort of adolescents?

Is it possible that some of the formulas that for years have seemed old-fashioned are starting to make sense again? A book, a long explanation, taking notes, memorizing certain contents, reading for a while without interruptions, doing exercises repeatedly, or facing an exam may seem like outdated tools in an educational system that has sought to evolve toward other methodologies. But if the problem is, in part, that students have increasing difficulty maintaining attention and consolidating knowledge, perhaps these tools are not as obsolete as has sometimes been thought. Time will tell. But the dissociation of children begins very early, even before they enter the classroom. Seeing babies who cannot even speak with their parents' mobile phones in their hands is now commonplace, but it remains surprising. And the school cannot and will not be able to reverse this.

Office regulations

Trying to halt pedagogical reform, an idea that has as many defenders as detractors, does not in any case mean simply returning to the educational system of the past. Neither a textbook solves the diversity of a classroom nor does adding more hours of Mathematics guarantee that students learn more. The problem is much more complex. A center must simultaneously attend to students with very different levels, newcomers who do not yet master the language, students with learning difficulties, and families in very diverse socioeconomic situations. And it must do so while curricula, forms of assessment, digital tools, and social demands on the school are changing. Teachers cannot do more than what is legislated by people from an air-conditioned office, while they and the students melt or freeze inside old and poorly insulated buildings.

The school also cannot deal with the gurus of "when I went to school there were 40 in class and there was no problem". They often forget that back then there were also students with autism, ADHD, other neurodivergences, or disabilities (and none who didn't speak Spanish or Catalan). The difference is that back then they were put in the 'dunce's battalion' and that was that. They were not attended to. Now, they are. Nor did anyone dare to opine with such joy about the work of professionals as happens now, when the pseudo-professors of Education at a bar counter with a beer in hand attack the school. Now it seems everyone knows about it.

The PISA results show that socioeconomic differences exist, but also that they do not explain everything. In the Balearic Islands, there is a difference of about 67 points between the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged students, which is lower than that of Spain, the OECD, and the European Union. And the difference in results between public and private schools is also reduced considerably when the socioeconomic profile of the students and the schools is taken into account. The problem, therefore, is not just who arrives in the classroom, but what happens inside that classroom and what tools the teacher has available to help all students progress.

There is, furthermore, another reality that is often hidden behind the figures: the effort that teaching entails today. The teacher must not only explain content. They have to prepare materials, adapt activities, cater to different levels, carry out individualized monitoring, assess competencies, coordinate with other teachers, and manage a much more heterogeneous classroom. In some centers, the textbook has lost importance and has been replaced by materials developed by the teachers themselves, projects, and digital resources. This change may have pedagogical advantages, but it also entails a workload that is not always seen when talking about educational results.

There is no single person responsible

PISA does not allow us to know which of these factors weighs more. And it would be a mistake to turn an international test into an explanation of everything that happens inside a school. The results are cold, the analyses, warm. But it does allow us to verify that something is not quite working: the Balearic Islands are not only below Spain, but also the OECD and the European Union in Reading, Mathematics, and Science (this has always been the case). And the problem is especially evident in Reading, where the 441 points place them among the communities with the worst results.

Now the Ministry has launched a new bet, but paradoxically a very old one: more knowledge, more hours of Mathematics, more hours of languages, more content, and fewer screens. It is an educational hypothesis as legitimate as any other, but not yet a conclusion. And the turn comes while the system drags one of its most evident shortcomings: the lack of teachers. In Ibiza, for example, Education is having difficulties filling positions and has opened the door for teachers of various specialties to be able to teach certain subjects if they have some training connection. In the most extreme cases, the positions are transformed into subject-area positions –by branches of knowledge–, so that a Social Sciences teacher can end up teaching Catalan without having completed the four years of specific university training in this language. The coming years will have to tell if Antoni Vera's shift is capable of reversing a trend that has not been built in a single school year, nor in ten, and that will be difficult to reverse if action is not taken on all fronts. Because what happens inside the classrooms is only part of the problem: the educational system also gambles its future outside of them.

What does seem clear is that the Balearic Islands need something more than arguing about whether the fault lies with the LOMLOE, the LOMCE, the Covid pandemic, mobile phones, teachers, families, or students. There is too much unproductive political noise. The PISA results put an accumulated problem on the table. Now it remains to be seen whether the change of direction undertaken by the Department of Education is capable of resolving it. And to know that, we will still have to wait a few more years in which the educational system would continue to live with the structural ills (and infrastructure problems) that plague it and that no Government has managed, for the moment, to truly solve.