The "errors" that prevent Catalonia's data from being valid for the PISA Report that will be published on September 8 continue to accumulate many more unknowns than answers. The appearance that the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, offered this Monday on the occasion of the start of the next school year ended up focused on this issue, but left new doubts about the reasons that caused 23.2% of the students selected in 2025 for the evaluations to be exempt from taking the test, a percentage much higher than the 5% recommended as a maximum by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), organizer of these international tests with 15-year-old students.
Niubó acknowledged that, between April and May of last year, the Ministry of Education alerted the Generalitat, at least on seven occasions, of the excessively high number of students who had been left out of the PISA tests due to criteria such as insufficient command of the language or cognitive, behavioral or emotional difficulties.
However, the conclusions of the proceedings opened half a year ago by the Department of Education and Vocational Training to clarify responsibilities have not yet clarified why the notices from the National Institute of Educational Evaluation (INEE) were not attended to when it was still possible to reverse the malpractice (the tests were carried out between March 31 and May 16). According to the counselor in her press conference, the notifications sent by the ministerial body to the Higher Evaluation Council of the Catalan Educational System never reached her table nor has it been proven that they were communicated to the schools. This autonomous entity, now extinct, and whose functions were transferred to the Education Evaluation and Foresight Agency, was in charge of organizing the PISA tests in the region. The still unresolved question is what went wrong so that the transmission chain was stopped at that point and prevented the correction of "some serious events," as Niubó herself defined them.
In a first notification, dated April 9, the INEE already alerted the Higher Evaluation Council of a higher percentage of excluded students in Catalonia than in other autonomous communities. As the counselor acknowledged, the Ministry body expressly asked that the centers be reminded that "only those students should be excluded for whom it was totally impossible to understand the tests or perform them under the required conditions." According to the information collected by the Generalitat "there is no evidence that this warning reached the educational centers nor that specific monitoring or correction actions were implemented." At that time, in addition, there were still schools that had to take the tests.
INEE warnings
The INEE continued sending technical reports with warnings during the following weeks until the end of the testing application period, the last of which dated May 30. Niubó pointed out that the next registered communication on this matter came at the end of February, when the Agency for Prospective Assessment of Education was "orally informed of a technical incident in the application of the tests of the previous course", which led to opening the informative proceedings on a confidential basis. And, according to his story, it was not until June when the INEE "duly reported the microdata that proves that only 5 of 51 centers met the student exemption rate recommended by the OECD."
The head of Education put aside any additional data to the sanctioning process that has been opened in this case. Specifically, the opening of a disciplinary file against three workers, two of whom are civil servants and one is a senior official in the Department of Education and Vocational Training. None of them currently perform their duties. Two of the files initiated are for serious misconduct and the other is open for minor misconduct due to a possible violation of the Transparency and Good Governance Law. The internal investigation that began in March has concluded that "there were errors in interpretation, supervision and transmission of information" in the process of applying international tests.
