The newsletter by Diego Núñez Fernández-Shaw. Analysis, context and strategic insight on the stories redefining education.
PISA, technology-led alternatives to university, partnerships with China, university absenteeism, and the teachers’ strike in Madrid all require a closer look at the value educational institutions offer today.
The start of the 2026–2027 school year brings together five structural challenges: university competitiveness, rigorous assessment, demographic decline, teacher authority, and conditions that can attract and retain talent.
July shows that innovation alone is no longer enough: AI is challenging university assessment, vocational training is seeking the right balance between digital and in-person learning, and the system must strengthen teacher preparation, recognition, and talent development.
June confirms that education is entering a phase of deeper tensions: conflict around publicly funded private schools, global university competition, AI reshaping assessment, digital vocational training, and technology becoming educational infrastructure.
May confirms a phase of forced adaptation: hybrid university and VET models, university mergers, teacher fatigue, new VET teaching requirements, and education losing political weight while internal wear increases across the system.
April shows an accumulation of tensions in the Spanish education system: a school leadership crisis, the debate on paper books and handwriting, pressure on inclusive education, university absenteeism, and operational risk in the private education market.
Education can no longer be explained through pedagogy alone. Employability, regulation, coexistence, data protection, public planning and market transformation — five signals of a system reorganizing under pressure.
February confirmed that education is not in a period of stability but of redefinition. VET regulation, the private sector debate, university employability, teacher wellbeing, digital governance and the mismatch between supply and demand — six signals of a system in full transformation.
The start of the year brings clear signals: subsidized schools lose families to private ones, UPV opens a campus in China, private universities outnumber public ones, Davos bets on education and technology, and Brighton College arrives in Madrid. Five movements defining the course of education.
A year of structural changes: early childhood centers facing demographic decline, higher VET surpassing university, private education growing 91%, foreign capital entering subsidized education, and a new Royal Decree redefining university rules. The year in education, reviewed.