How Schooling Works in Mallorca

Three types of school operate on the island, and the difference is about funding and admission, not necessarily quality. Público schools are run directly by the Govern de les Illes Balears: free, open to any family, with places allocated by a points system (the baremo) rather than first-come-first-served. Concertado schools are privately run — often by a religious order or a cooperative — but funded by the state under a concierto, an agreement that makes the compulsory stages, from infantil through ESO, free by law. In practice, most concertados also charge for extras: materials, activities, the canteen, that kind of thing. National consumer-association studies put this at 83–85% of concertados charging some form of “voluntary” fee, though there's no Balearic-specific figure — nobody has audited what share of the islands' concertados do this, so treat that number as a mainland-wide signal, not a confirmed local one. Privado schools charge full fees and sit entirely outside the state admissions process: a family applies directly to the school, on the school's own terms and timeline.

Spanish schooling breaks into stages, and knowing which one your child falls into matters for admissions timing. Educació infantil starts with the 1r cicle, ages 0 to 3: this is paid, places are limited, and — unlike everything that follows — it isn't a legal right, so demand regularly outstrips supply. The 2n cicle, ages 3 to 6, flips that: it's free and near-universal, with the overwhelming majority of children enrolled. Primària covers ages 6 to 12. ESO (Educació Secundària Obligatòria) covers 12 to 16 and is compulsory — this is where mandatory schooling ends. From 16, families choose between batxillerat (16–18, the academic pre-university track) and FP (formació professional, vocational training with its own entry routes and specialisms).

Language of instruction is the most contested question in Mallorcan schooling, and it's worth understanding the actual rules rather than picking a side. Decret 92/1997 set a minimum of 50% of teaching hours in Catalan across the curriculum. The Balearic education law passed in 2022 kept that 50% floor while making both Catalan and Spanish official vehicular languages — both can be used to teach, but Catalan can't drop below half. Since a pact between the PP and Vox in November 2023, a voluntary program sits on top of that baseline: the Pla pilot de lliure elecció de llengua, letting families at participating schools request more teaching hours in Spanish. As of the 2025/26 school year it covers 19 schools — all of them concertados, none of them público — and its budget was cut from a planned roughly €20 million down to around €1 million. A broader push to make free language choice mandatory across all schools went to the regional Parliament and was rejected, so as of August 2026 there's no generally binding free-choice law — only the small voluntary pilot. The courts have weighed in too: the Tribunal Superior de Justícia de les Illes Balears (TSJIB) upheld the 50% Catalan floor and separately rejected a proposed mandatory 25% Spanish quota, in a ruling decided on 4 September 2025. The teachers' union STEI-i has an unresolved lawsuit against the pilot itself, calling it “linguistic segregation” between participating and non-participating schools; the Obra Cultural Balear opposes it on similar grounds; the regional government frames it as family choice. Both positions are argued in good faith, and neither is settled beyond what's stated above. The practical bottom line for a family choosing a school: in the large majority of público and concertado schools, Catalan remains the main teaching language, at roughly the 50% floor set by law.

If your children don't speak Catalan or Spanish yet, the support they get depends heavily on their age, and it's worth knowing the gap before you arrive rather than after. PALIC (Pla d'Acollida Lingüística i Cultural) is the formal reception program for newly arrived students — but it's explicitly secondary-only, set out in its founding Ordre of 14 June 2002 and its governing Resolució of 16 February 2018. Primary school has no equivalent binding program: only non-binding 2010 guidance, the Orientacions per a l'elaboració del Pla d'Acollida a l'Educació Primària, which schools aren't required to follow. Where it is followed, it suggests 4 to 10 hours a week of extra language support for the 2n cicle (roughly ages 8 to 10) and 6 to 12 hours a week for the 3r cicle (roughly ages 10 to 12) — and specifies no allocation at all for the 1r cicle, ages 6 to 8. In practice, the youngest arriving children are expected to pick up the language through ordinary classroom immersion alongside their peers, with no dedicated language-support hours guaranteed. That's worth flagging plainly, because 6 to 8 is exactly the age bracket where a lot of relocating families' children land.

You won't find a “best schools in Mallorca” ranking anywhere, and that's by design rather than an oversight. Balearic school inspection reports simply aren't published. IAQSE, the regional assessment institute, runs diagnostic tests in every school, but each school only receives its own results plus the regional average for comparison — the explicit purpose is to stop league tables from forming. PISA, the international benchmark most parents have heard of, samples at the regional level in Spain, not the school level, so a per-school PISA score doesn't exist to publish even if someone wanted to. What regional PISA data does show: Baleares scored 471 in maths in the 2022 round against a national average of 473, and the region has Spain's second-highest school dropout rate, at 18.2% — both are island-wide figures, not a signal about any individual school. The one clean, verifiable per-school signal that does exist is accreditation: whether a school holds IB World School or Cambridge status, for instance, is a fact you can check directly with the accrediting body, rather than a claim you have to take on trust.