Sharing Policy Design Options with Barcelona’s Municipal Education Council

On 10 November 2025, Antoni Verger and Edgar Quilabert, together with Delfina Campetella, Mauro Moschetti, Marcel Pagès, and Marina Castany, delivered the presentation “Educational Zones as Spaces of Governance: Policy Options” to the Comissió de Treball sobre Zones Educatives of the Consell d’Educació Municipal de Barcelona (CEMB), the city’s official forum for stakeholder participation in education.

The session launched a three-part working commission through which the CEMB would examine, over the following months, whether and how Barcelona should further develop its educational-zone model.

The case and the evidence

The team began by outlining the central diagnosis: many educational challenges cut across sectors and institutions and therefore exceed the capacity of individual schools, while a governance model centred on school autonomy can generate fragmentation, particularly in vulnerable contexts.

They then presented educational zones as spaces organised around collaboration, shared responsibility, and collective ownership, and identified six recurring conditions for success emerging from their comparative mapping of international cases.

Translating the approach to Catalonia

Drawing on the interrupted 2008–2009 educational-zones pilot in Catalonia, as well as the current Zona Nord initiative and experimental-zones programme, the presentation highlighted four decisive considerations.

First, zones must operate at an appropriate territorial scale, which should not necessarily be equated with municipalisation. Second, they require meaningful competencies, resources, and implementation capacity. Third, their governance must be built around shared leadership involving the Department of Education, local authorities, and community actors. Finally, educational zones should be developed as a universal policy: implementation may begin in the most complex territories, but zones should not be conceived as exceptional or temporary responses to crisis.