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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Balearic Islands will begin the 2026-2027 academic year with fewer students in both public and charter schools. The decline, however, is not distributed evenly. Of the 2,342 students that the educational system will lose compared to last year, 2,248 correspond to public schools and only 94 to charter schools. The picture left by the enrollment figures is, therefore, one of a general decrease in the student body that affects both networks, but with a much more intense impact on public centers. Specifically, public centers go from 106,876 students in the 2025-2026 academic year to 104,628 this year, a reduction of 2.1%. Charter schools, on the other hand, go from 54,325 to 54,231 students, only 0.2% less. The trend follows the path of the start of the two previous academic years (2024-2025-2025-2026), when the public sector cumulatively lost more than a thousand students and the charter sector added 2,607.

The advancement of final exams and the closing of evaluation records for first-year Baccalaureate has altered the end of the school year in the Balearic Islands' high schools and has opened a growing debate among teachers, families, and students about the real meaning of June now. The decision by the Department of Education—which sets the closing of ordinary grades before June 5 and keeps classes until the 19th—aimed to reorganize the calendar, advance retakes, and dedicate the following weeks to both supporting students with pending subjects and maintaining teaching activity with approved students. However, on the ground, the majority perception is different: absenteeism has soared and effective learning time has been lost.

María Pombo, one of the influencers most followed in Spain, has been the protagonist of two of the questions on the Spanish exam for the Selectividad (university entrance exam) taken by students from the Balearic Islands this Tuesday, the first day of the PAU tests in the Archipelago. Specifically, the content creator appears in the question where students are asked to identify and explain the syntactic relationships established between the clauses in the following fragment: "The controversy surrounding María Pombo regarding reading has demonstrated the capacity that social networks have today to fix a debate in public conversation".

“You’re almost there. You’ve completed a demanding high school program, and now the most important thing is to trust yourselves and arrive with a clear head.” This is the main recommendation made by Fèlix Coll, a former student of IES Biel Martí de Ferreries and one of the students with the highest grades in the 2025 Selectividad (university entrance exam), to the students taking it this year. He achieved a score of 9.35 without weighting and is now studying Electronic, Industrial, and Automatic Engineering at the UIB. Coll offers advice for facing the three days of evaluations in the University Access Test (PAU), which this year will be taken by 4,950 students from educational centers in the Balearic Islands on June 2, 3, and 4. The figure is slightly higher than last year, when 4,860 students participated. The majority of the examinees are from Mallorca (80.9%), followed by Ibiza (9.6%), Menorca (9.1%), and Formentera (0.4%). Women continue to be the majority, with 60.2% of the total.

The trade unions CCOO, UGT and STEI Intersindical have announced the postponement of the strike for 0-3 year olds' education scheduled for this Tuesday, June 2. The organizations explain that the decision has been made "out of strict responsibility" and to guarantee the "legal protection of workers".

Separate students with the best grades from the rest of the students to create an Excellence Bachelor's itinerary. This is the bet of the Department 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 enrich, because the 'good ones' are a model for the rest. Grouping students just because they have a very high performance, is that the only objective?", he asks. With this Bachelor's degree 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.

In the classroom, the ones who need help the most don't always get the most attention. Often, the opposite is true. Among students with visible difficulties and a strained educational system, there's a group that still falls by the wayside: students with high abilities. In the Balearic Islands, there are 3,128 identified, a figure much lower than what is estimated to exist. “It has been little recognized, little understood, and little identified”, explains Rosabel Rodríguez, director of the Program for the Attention of Intellectual High Abilities (PACiS) at the UIB. This lack of recognition has consequences: “They are given very deficient educational attention in general. Many times, it doesn't even exist”.

The Department of Education will regulate the presence of volunteers within educational centers through the entities that make up the Platform of Volunteering of the Balearic Islands. The initiative, which was recently presented to educational counselors, aims to establish a common framework so that the participation of volunteers in centers is developed with clearly defined pedagogical, organizational, and legal criteria.

Marga Prohens' Government will create a Baccalaureate of Excellence –a name chosen by themselves, with all the ideological baggage it implies– and will establish a specific institute to gather the “excellent” students there. It is hard to find a more anti-pedagogical initiative. Or worse still, a more profoundly reactionary one.

At university, group work has consolidated as a key learning tool, in line with the principles of the Bologna Process. But behind the idea of cooperation and preparation for the professional world, tensions lurk, such as inequalities between classmates, diverse evaluation systems, and a question that divides students and teachers: is it really fair how collective work is evaluated?

The Government will launch a new Baccalaureate Excellence Program (PEB) that will begin operating in a newly created center in Palma, named IES Llorenç Villalonga, and which will also have a presence in Ibiza and Menorca through specific classrooms. The initial offer will be divided into two training pathways: one oriented towards Science and Technology and another focused on Humanities and Social Sciences. According to the Minister of Education and Universities, Antoni Vera, the future institute in Palma will be approved shortly by the Governing Council and, provisionally, will be installed in the Sa Riera building of the UIB.

The first Baròmetro of the Social Council of the UIB shows that only 51.2% of students would prefer to mostly receive classes in Catalan, while 40.4% opt for Spanish, in a context of linguistic coexistence but with significant differences depending on studies and territories. The survey, based on 2,067 responses, also reveals that the use of Catalan in classrooms varies significantly between faculties and islands, with particularly unique cases like Formentera, where no student declares wanting to mostly receive classes in Spanish.

The Governing Council has given the go-ahead to the decree that sets the foundations for the new Baccalaureate Excellence Program (PEB), an initiative aimed at fostering and recognizing the academic performance of students with the most outstanding results. As explained by the Executive's spokesperson, Antoni Costa, the program will provide students with additional tools and a specific framework designed to enhance talent during the post-compulsory stage.

First words of the teacher who suffered the homophobic aggression at IES Baltasar Porcel, a case that ARA Balears exclusively reported and in which several minors have already been identified. “I am very grateful for the support received. I finish at the center this Wednesday and right now I am correcting the last exams. I am fine, in fact, I am very well. I have a lot of work, but I feel good,” he explains. “I have a law degree. I had a class with the suspects and I made them read the Penal Code and the Minor's Law, to show them that, even though they are minors, all types of crimes have consequences. They are 16 and 17 years old, and everything has repercussions: even if they don't go to prison, they can be sent to a juvenile center,” he adds in conversation with ARA Balears.