Catalonia education department faces dual scandals over staff transfer list error and PISA exclusion rate

The Catalan Department of Education, led by Minister Esther Niubo, has withdrawn a provisional list of staff transfer placements after a calculation error affected roughly 400 education workers. The union Intersindical highlighted systematic problems in merit scoring, citing missed years of service and qualifications, and warned that such errors recur across multiple recruitment rounds.

Separately, the OECD identified an unusually high student exclusion rate in Catalonia’s PISA sample – almost five times the permitted level. While the national PISA results remain unchanged, the Catalan data will be flagged with a methodological warning and excluded from the international report, limiting comparability with other regions and previous editions. The Spanish Ministry of Education detected the anomaly in March and received the OECD’s final decision on April 20. Both incidents have drawn criticism of the regional education administration’s handling of data and personnel processes.