The SIAU union denounces that the union elections for non-university teaching staff in the Balearic Islands have begun with “less transparency and guarantees” than four years ago. Today, the coordinating electoral boards for each island have been formally constituted, which marks the start of the electoral process, which will culminate with the vote on December 2nd. The electoral campaign will take place from November 16th to 30th.

Teachers in the Balearic Islands will head to the polls on December 2nd to elect their union representatives. The elections come at a particularly relevant time for the future of the education system, because the representatives who emerge from this process will be in charge of negotiating and implementing the new 2027-2031 educational framework agreement with the Ministry of Education and, subsequently, monitoring it and overseeing its application over the coming years. The electoral calendar is already set. The censuses will be published on October 22nd at 10:00 AM and teachers will have until October 27th at 10:00 AM to submit claims. The final census will be published on October 29th at 12:00 PM.

STEI demands the resignation of the Director General of Early Childhood, Neus Riera, due to the management of the 49 new Early Childhood Education Technician (TEI) positions created for the 2026-2027 academic year. The union considers that the Ministry of Education has managed these positions in a “disastrous” manner and denounces that the professionals have not been appointed to vacancies for the entire school year. According to STEI, this week Riera was scheduled to appear before the Sectoral Board of General Services, at the union's request, to provide explanations regarding the situation. Specifically, she was to explain why the 49 new TEI positions have not been filled with vacancy appointments. Ultimately, according to the union, the Director General did not appear and submitted a written statement with her explanations.

There is a border within schools and institutes that is not visible in the classrooms. It does not separate teachers from professors, nor Primary and Vocational Training from Secondary. It is a letter and a number: A1 or A2. An administrative classification linked to the level of qualification required to access the different teaching bodies which, decades later, continues to determine the place each professional occupies within the civil service. An Infant or Primary school teacher and a Secondary school teacher have different functions, different specialties, and work with students of different ages. But they are all part of the same educational structure. The paradox is that the university reform that converted the old diplomas and degrees into undergraduate degrees was not accompanied by an equivalent revision of the teaching bodies, a fact that has generated an organizational and, above all, salary inequality.

The Department of Education and the Council of Formentera want to build about forty rental homes intended for teaching staff displaced to the island. The two administrations signed a protocol to promote the project, which aims to provide a response to one of the main obstacles to covering and retaining teachers on the island, who mostly come from outside: the difficulty of finding affordable and stable housing. The future apartments would be located on land that the Council will cede in Es Pujols. The project is still in an initial phase. The administrations must specify the accommodation needs, the location, and the financing formulas. In addition, a technical commission will be created that will have up to twelve months to prepare a report with the diagnosis of needs and a proposal for action. Work is also being done with the Council of Ibiza to activate a similar project.

Vocational Training (VT) has become one of the great areas of growth for education in the Balearic Islands, but it is also a terrain where private initiative is increasingly gaining weight. The demand for professional studies is increasing and, while the public network expands places, teaching staff, and cycles at the pace it can, private centers take advantage of the gaps left by an administration that needs more time to launch new offerings. The result is that the private sector is no longer a marginal player within VT. In Mallorca, in fact, it already has more presence than the subsidized network.

The start of the school year in the Balearic Islands is once again marked by deficiencies in the air conditioning of educational centers. This Tuesday, at 1 p.m., the thermometer in the classroom of the CEIP Es Puig in Lloseta climbed to 30.4 °C, with 32% relative humidity. The situation inside the school has reached the limit of indignation, to the point that the school's own director, Miquel Bujosa, has defined the situation bluntly: "It's a heatwave".

The Sagrat Cor school in Palma is launching a new educational cycle this academic year: for the first time, the center is welcoming children from 0 to 3 years old. However, the start of the new cycle has arrived before the facilities are finished. The classrooms that are to house the youngest children are still under construction and the playground assigned to them is also not, according to the families, in a condition to be used, with many children who are still learning to walk. This has been explained by families from the center to ARA Balears, which has been able to see photographs that confirm the inadequate state of the spaces.

The Minister of Education, Antoni Vera, has put on the table the lines of negotiation for the next agreement on socio-labor improvements for workers in subsidized centers, with the aim of progressively advancing towards equalization with teachers in the public network. Vera has defended that during this legislature almost all the measures provided for in the 2023 framework agreement have already been applied and that, in some cases, the initial forecasts have been exceeded. Among the actions, he highlighted the reduction of the teaching day in Secondary Education, which has gone from 24 to 23 hours, as well as the implementation of the tutoring supplement.

STEI has initiated judicial proceedings to demand that non-university teaching staff in the Balearic Islands receive their extraordinary payments in full and has requested that the claim have a retroactivity of four years, with the payment of the amounts that would have gone unpaid and the corresponding legal interest. The claim focuses on the composition of the two extraordinary payments that teaching staff receive annually. The union considers that currently, certain remuneration supplements are not fully included, which, according to its interpretation of current regulations, should be part of them.

Antoni Vera faces the final year of the legislative term at the head of the Department of Education and Universities with a track record marked by the boost to subsidized private schools, attempts to accelerate educational infrastructure, and the emergence of private universities in the Balearic Islands. Born in Palma in 1973, the minister reaches the final stretch of his mandate with some of the main educational debates still open and with the desire to highlight the work done during these three years.

At the gates of the CEIP Aina Moll school in Palma, this Thursday morning, there is a bit of everything that returning to school means. Children running in, parents extending the goodbye for a few seconds, backpacks still without a single stain, and the occasional cry that escapes just before crossing the door. There are also those who arrive with their holidays still stuck to their faces and those who, on the other hand, seem delighted to see their friends again. "I was more eager than he was to return," jokes a mother as she accompanies her son to the entrance. The boy, however, does not seem very worried about the start of the school year. He looks towards the door and just waits to be let in. "Yesterday he said he didn't want to come and today there is no stopping him," she explains.

The school year begins in the Balearic Islands with a question that goes beyond the PISA report grades and the sense of uncertainty and disappointment they have caused: what should be done now? The results of PISA 2025, published this Tuesday, have left the Islands below the Spanish, EU, and OECD averages in the three evaluated competencies: 441 points in Reading, 449 in Mathematics, and 471 in Science. Compared to the 2022 edition, the drop is 31 points in Reading comprehension, 22 in Mathematics, and 9 in Science.

Coinciding with the start of a new school year and still reeling from the defeat of the PISA results, the Balearic Islands' education system is once again facing the same question, but with renewed urgency: what should be done now? The Islands have fallen below the Spanish, EU, and OECD averages in Mathematics, Reading, and Science, and the number of students who do not reach the minimum competencies once again calls into question the system's ability to guarantee basic learning.

Alternativa Docent believes that the results of the 2025 PISA report, which place the Balearic Islands below the Spanish, OECD, and European Union average in Mathematics, Reading, and Science, "are no surprise." The union points out that the Islands' educational system has been dragging a combination of shortcomings for years that hinder the improvement of learning. The organization argues that there is not a single cause that explains the results, but rather a sum of factors. Among these, it points to "historical underfunding," overcrowded and heterogeneous classrooms, the lack of teachers and covered positions, continuous legislative changes, the impact of screens and artificial intelligence, and socioeconomic inequalities.

The Department of Education will open proceedings against privately managed (charter) nursery schools that have breached regulations. This was announced this Wednesday by the Minister, Antoni Vera, during the Government control session in Parliament, in response to questions from the opposition regarding the incidents reported by the workers of the 0-3 Network during the summer months. Vera differentiated between the situations detected during the summer and those that have occurred with the start of the school year. As he explained, during the summer period the Department does not have the capacity to intervene because it does not correspond to the charter hours. "In the summer we have no way to intervene," he assured.

The 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 carried out in 2025. The situation is especially worrying in Reading Comprehension, where the Islands fall to 441 points, 31 less 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, in 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.

While there are still a few days left to return to the classrooms, a group of students from IES Joan Alcover has already begun preparing for the new school year. They have done so voluntarily, dedicating one of the last afternoons of their vacation to a task that will not only affect them: preparing and covering the books for the center's reuse program. The students met at the institute itself to review and prepare the copies that, once the school year begins, will pass into their hands and those of their classmates. They have been covering the books and preparing them so they can be used during the course and, subsequently, once again become part of the reuse program.

Educational unions react with very different diagnoses to the poor results of the Balearic Islands in the 2025 PISA report. While SIAU considers that the data once again demonstrates the "failure of the educational model that is being imposed in the Balearic Islands" and demands a change of course, STEI rejects that the results should become a tool to question teachers and focuses on the lack of resources and investment. ANPE, for its part, demands addressing the structural problems of the system and warns that PISA does not allow attributing the results to a single cause.

The Balearic Islands worsen their results in the three competencies evaluated by the 2025 PISA report, with an especially sharp decline in reading comprehension. Students from the Islands obtain 441 points in Reading, 449 in Mathematics and 471 in Science. The most pronounced drop is in Reading, where the Balearic Islands go from 472 points in PISA 2022 to the current 441, losing 31 points in a single cycle. In Mathematics, the setback is 22 points, from 471 to 449, while in Science the decline is more moderate: nine points, from 480 to 471. It should be remembered that, according to the same regulations that govern the tests, a difference of more than 20 points is considered significant and is equivalent to a full school year of work.