President signs agreement with OECD to 'improve' Catalan education system

Catalan president Salvador Illa and the president and director of the Education Department of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Andreas Schleicher, signed an agreement on Wednesday to "improve" the Catalan education system.

The deal comes a year after Catalan students recorded their worst-ever results in the PISA tests, exams for 15-year-old students around the world conducted by the OECD.

This initiative is part of one of Illa's key campaign promises to improve education, and is one of his first actions to fulfill it.

However, the president warned that the agreement will not yield immediate results but will show progress in four years.

In 2025, the OECD will conduct a diagnosis of the situation, and in 2026, the first agreed-upon measures will start being implemented. These measures will be consolidated in 2027, with results expected in 2028.

Illa stressed that there are schools that work "very well" and that he has confidence in the Catalan education system and its teachers. 

However, the president warned that several reports and indicators have revealed the poor results among Catalan students and that there is " room for improvement."

Schleicher said that Catalonia has the "tools and resources" to become a world leader in education and announced that, to achieve this, they will adopt techniques proven successful in other countries.

"Catalonia is very well positioned to become one of the world's leading education systems: it pays its teachers well, it has good resources, it gives students a good amount of learning time. The fundamentals are very strong for Catalonia to achieve very high performance standards," he said.

To learn more about the Catalan education system and the latest PISA results, listen to this episode of our podcast Filling the Sink from January 2024.