The legal conflict over the use of languages in Catalan schools remains alive, resulting in a continuous trickle of rulings with little impact on the schools. At least, for now, and until the Constitutional Court rules on linguistic immersion.
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The latest ruling was announced yesterday. In it, the Supreme Court (TS) holds that signs and posters in Catalan schools that use Catalan as the usual language cannot exclude Spanish. From the name of the school to various signages. It considers that Spanish, being a co-official language in Catalonia, must be present since not using it would be “disrespectful” and contrary to the Constitution.
According to the ruling
The language used in signage is part of the landscape and “is not irrelevant to teaching”
The origin of the ruling dates back to an order from the Department of Education for the 2022-2023 school year, which explicitly banned Spanish on signs and posters in public and charter schools in Catalonia, except for some student work.
The Assembly for a Bilingual School (AEB) challenged this ban before the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), which in April 2025 dismissed the request as unrelated to teaching itself and upheld the regulation of signage in Catalan. The AEB appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in its favor, arguing that the configuration of school facilities “are effectively the ‘stage’ or the ‘landscape’ of educational activity and, consequently, are part of it.” The language used in signage “is not irrelevant to teaching.”
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For the High Court, “it is not the same, for the purposes of the vision of things conveyed to students, a physical space where signs and posters are only in one of the two languages of the corresponding autonomous community.” It also recalls that Spanish is an official language throughout Spain, which means it cannot be excluded in communications between public authorities and citizens. “This means that excluding the use of Spanish for these purposes is not respectful of Article 3 of the Constitution, not to mention that it may introduce an unjustified difference in linguistic treatment for the purposes of Article 14 of the constitutional charter itself.”
The AEB demands that it be executed “immediately and loyally” or it will demand it in court
Sources from the Department of Education indicate that the instructions for the 2026-2027 school year do not include references to signage and that the ruling itself states that “it is unlawful to exclude signage in Spanish in publicly funded schools, not that there is a duty to put up signs in Spanish.”
The AEB, for its part, demands that the department execute the ruling “immediately and loyally” and not evade the ruling as it is prepared to go back to court. In its view, the court’s ruling “delegitimizes” a policy that has sought to build in Catalan schools an ecosystem from which Spanish would be “erased.”
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