2.1. The modernist paradigm

Although expressions of the modernist paradigm in the literature are not uniform or uncontested [13], a dominant modernist orientation has been identified in the education discourse of the OECD, especially in its framing of the purpose of education in terms of its value for the ‘knowledge economy’ [12,14,27]. More broadly, the OECD can be associated with the adoption of economic growth as the primary societal goal pursued through policymaking [28]. This can also be interpreted as part of a wider shift towards a market society [29], in which social relations are increasingly mediated through economic logics and individuals are governed as ‘homo oeconomicus’ [30]. In this context, education has become increasingly understood through instrumental reason [31], and the privileging of measurable knowledge and skills useful to the economy. While this does not necessarily imply the preclusion of critical reflection, critics argue that such orientations may limit the extent to which education engages with broader social and ecological consequences of knowledge production, and may contribute to a framing of scientific and technological progress and economic growth as inherently desirable [32]. As such, education is seen as a tool to produce ‘human capital’, a term coined by the economist Gary Becker of the Chicago School of Economics in 1964 and then popularised by the OECD and the World Bank [33,34]. Since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1990s, managerial techniques have increasingly been applied to education and education policy, emphasizing efficiency and standardization, and giving rise to both individual mechanisms of competition within standardised quantitative rankings and the competition between educational institutions, e.g., through performance-based assessment criteria and associated funding programmes [12].

While the OECD is currently considered to be the most influential international organisation in education policy [12], its founding convention in 1960 did not mention education. This focus emerged in the 1990s as part of the OECD’s economic agenda which included education as part of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ [13] and considered it as a productive economic factor necessary for GDP growth. This was accompanied by the collection of a vast amount of quantitative data across education systems from OECD countries and beyond. Individual policy recommendations to its member states involved fostering mechanisms of competition within standardised quantitative rankings in educational institutions [12].

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study is considered the most influential of these studies and has been published by the OECD since 2000, based on the assessment of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics and science. Reducing the complexity of education down to quantifiable metrics and competitive rankings that are easy to communicate, has enabled the OECD to exert substantial discursive power in educational policymaking in the absence of any regulatory competences [35]. By combining this data with the OECD’s economistic language around education, test-based accountability could therefore be framed as an objective, a political and technocratic way of optimizing education results. Yet, since measuring education cannot be fully neutral in its choice of what and how to measure [36], the supposedly ‘objective’ data provided by these tests support currently dominant economic interests and logics. Since this education paradigm sees students as largely passive subjects that are trained to pass standardized testing, this can be seen as a process of governmentality [37] aimed at disciplining subjects through their own self-government along dominant norms of productivity and efficiency, thereby producing subjectivities that will align themselves with the system’s objectives and that will be able to effectively contribute to extractivist and unsustainable societies and economies.

2.2. Moving towards transformative sustainable education

Transformative sustainability education builds on Critical Pedagogy which sees education as praxis for emancipation and social transformation [38,39]. In this view, education is not seen as a transmission from subject (teacher) to object (student), but as a relational process [38]. This relational perspective extends beyond student-teacher relations and is also applied to the school as a whole and its interconnectedness and embeddedness in the community and ecosystems, also known as a whole school approach [40,41]. The school is thus seen as a place that centres locally situated knowledge and real-world interactions, including with nature and people through nature [42]. Connected to this is the concept of experiential and embodied learning. Rejecting Cartesian mind/body dualism, these notions emphasize that learning is not a purely cognitive process separated from bodies, but emerges from experience and contact with the world, through emotions and sensory experiences [43,44]. Following these insights, transformative sustainability education seeks to actively empower learners through the learning process, allowing them to take an active role and generate and apply knowledge to achieve change [40].

Cultivating such a sense of agency is seen as especially important in light of rising environmental anxiety among young people, leading to despair and apathy [45]. Experimenting with local solutions is promoted to give agency to students instead of paralysing them with information [46]. Yet, solving the ‘crisis of hope’ caused by environmental anxiety requires not only experimenting with action in the here and now, but also envisioning alternative futures to counter prevalent dystopian predictions [46]. As argued by Castoriadis [47] and Fisher [48], a key barrier to transformative action amid current unsustainable trajectories is the narrowness of prevalent social imaginaries and a general inability to imagine futures beyond dominant modernist concepts of progress and development. Transformative sustainability education, therefore, seeks to empower students to “explore, imagine, and enact alternative, plausible, and desirable futures” [49], using creative and transdisciplinary approaches and drawing on Indigenous people´s knowledges about living well in nature [49,50].

While in practice, educational discourses often combine elements of both paradigms discussed above, we use the distinction between modernist and transformative educational paradigms as an analytical entry point to examine the analysis of the developments and contestations in education policy. The next section will present our conceptual and methodological approach applied to the illustrative case of Spain.

3.1. Ethics statement

The interviewees which took part in the research process, voluntarily signed a written informed consent sheet and the study received ethical approval by the Ethics Committee of the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3).

3.2. Discourse analysis

We apply discourse analysis (DA) to analyse how modernist and transformative visions for education are constructed and contested. DA is particularly suited to analyse the interplay of language, power, and policy [51], allowing us to trace why certain understandings of education became dominant, while others are marginalised. Drawing on Hajer, a discourse is understood here as “the ensemble of ideas, concepts and categories through which meaning is given to social and physical phenomena, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set of practices” [52]. We thus interpret policy texts not as neutral descriptions of reality but as part of a wider discursive context, and as resulting from struggles over meaning. Following Foucault [37], discourse not only reflects but constitutes social reality, shaping people’s subjectivities and normalizing particular ways of thinking and acting. Since discourses are historically and culturally situated, as Foucault insists, one needs to ask how discourses arise and which societal institutions are associated with their dominance while highlighting opportunities prevented by dominant logics. This is known as a genealogical approach [53,54]. Over time, dominant discourses may become normalised to the extent that they become ‘common sense’ [55], shaping what can be thought, said and done. Foucault’s notion of ‘enunciative modalities’ furthermore highlights how discourses regulate who can speak and from what position, establishing boundaries of legitimacy in policy debates [56].

This hegemony is, however, never complete. Counter-discourses challenge dominant meanings and discursive fields are often sites of contestation [51]. To identify such contestations of and openings in hegemonic discourse, we apply Howarth’s notion of articulation [54,57]. Articulation is defined as the process by which discourses are (re)constructed by contesting and unfixing dominant signifiers and by introducing new signifiers. In particular, we analyse how dislocatory events (events which challenge and destabilise the hegemonic discourse) create fields of opening [58] for dominant signifiers of the discourse to be contested and elements of counter-discourse to be articulated. Moreover, we analyse how these elements can be linked together in ‘chains of equivalence’ [59], whereby different struggles are connected under shared signifiers to coalesce into alternative hegemonic discourses.

Our analysis focuses on education policy in Spain as an illustrative case to show how different education paradigms are articulated, contested, and included in policy. We have undertaken a document analysis of Spain’s education laws on the national level since the beginning of the transition from dictatorship to liberal democracy in the mid-1970s (the first law being promulgated in 1980), mainly focussing on their respective preambles, where the justification of the laws and their guiding principles are explicitly stated (see Table 1). We collected additional contextual data from specific articles of these laws, relevant official curricula, minutes of parliamentary sessions debating the laws, and historical accounts.

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Table 1. List of analysed Spanish education laws (1980-2025).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267.t001

We complemented our analysis with seven in-depth interviews with key policymakers, educators and members of social-(ecological) movements that have influenced educational discourse in Spain, particularly regarding sustainability education, whereby sampling was concluded once thematic saturation was reached. Respondents were purposively selected to gain insights into the processes and forces behind the changes in discourse that were identified in the document analysis and trace how key counter-hegemonic actors navigated and introduced alternative signifiers into the dominant institutional discourse. The interviews were conducted between February and September 2025, lasted on average 60 minutes, were audio-recorded and transcribed. Lastly, additional education laws and policy strategy documents on the international and regional levels that were mentioned in these interviews as relevant to the development of the Spanish education policy were included in a second round of document analysis (Table 2).

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Table 2. Relevant education laws and policy strategy documents on the international and regional level interacting with Spanish education laws.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267.t002

The discourse analysis followed an iterative coding process. Firstly, the documents were coded with NVivo software starting with core categories of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses as identified in the previous section (see Table 3). These categories were not treated as fixed or mutually exclusive, but as sensitising categories at two extremes of a spectrum which served as entry points to guide the analysis. In subsequent rounds of coding, an inductive approach was used to identify nuances in these initial distinctions, including hybrid and context-specific articulations that did not fit neatly within a binary classification. Triangulation with in-depth interviews helped ensure the validity of the findings, as well as gathering complementary information needed to explain the identified discursive changes [60]. Illustrative quotes from documents and interviews were translated from Spanish to English by the authors and are presented throughout section 4 to discuss the articulations of the discourses.

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Table 3. Coding scheme of discourse analysis.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267.t003

As researchers situated within institutions studying sustainability transformations, we recognise our normative alignment with the broad goals of transformative sustainability education (TSE). This proximity inherently shapes our perspective and situates us within the very discourses we study. On the one hand, this positionality was highly advantageous: it facilitated access to key informants advocating for TSE, as shared vocabularies helped to establish trust. On the other hand, we acknowledge the risk of uncritically championing laws with which these informants were involved, while treating other laws as monolithic adversaries. To mitigate this, we rigorously triangulated informant interviews with our policy document analysis and intentionally coded for nuances, contradictions, and hybridity in the articulation of elements of different discourses within the same policies.

3.3. Case study background: the Spanish education system and its evolution

The Spanish education system is state-funded, with public and private state-subsidized schools (colegios concertados) providing primary and compulsory secondary education free of charge, alongside private schools, which charge tuition fees [61]. The education system is mostly decentralized, with legal competences shared between the national administration and the autonomous communities [61]. While the national government sets the core curriculum, the autonomous communities implement these minimum teaching requirements and are free to add content beyond the core curriculum [62].

It is important to highlight the decades of consolidation of an authoritarian education system in the 20^th century under the Francoist dictatorship (1936–1975), which has had long-lasting effects on Spanish educational institutions and discourses. Education under the dictatorship can be divided into a fascist-totalitarian period and a technocratic period [63]. The first period, starting in the late 1930s, saw a rejection of modern pedagogy in favour of socialization according to the regime’s Spanish nationalist and catholic values, where investment in education was low and left largely to the Catholic Church [63,64]. From the 1950s, Spain’s economic opening was accompanied by a technocratic education reform aligned with international recommendations to serve the needs of a rapid industrialization process. The first reliable assessment of the education system in 1969 revealed the woeful state of the education system, prompting a further push towards technocratic modernization in form of the LGE (Ley General de Educación - General Education Act) education reform in 1970 based on UNESCO, World Bank and OECD recommendations, which introduced standardised and compulsory education until age 14 [63,65].

In Spain’s long transition to liberal democracy, the article laying out the legal framework for the education system in the constitution ratified in 1978 already became one of the most controversial and hardest to negotiate [66]. While the conservatives, representing the pillar of the Francoist regime, pushed for continued state support for the private education sector run principally by the catholic church during the dictatorship, the progressive forces, who opposed the Francoist regime, advocated for a fully public, secular, and egalitarian system [66,67]. Meanwhile, the regions of Catalonia and the Basque Country demanded independent education systems to guarantee respect for their differentiated languages and cultural identities [67]. Since then, education has remained one of the most contested elements in Spanish politics [66].

4.1. Spain’s education discourses: a historical view

This section traces the development of Spain’s education policy discourses from the beginning of the democratic transition to the present. The analysis illustrates how aspirations for emancipatory education gave way to a neoliberal approach based on dominant OECD discourse. We also demonstrate that in recent years, openings are starting to appear in dominant discourse that enable the introduction of novel elements associated with the transformative sustainability education paradigm. The analysis is structured into three periods (see Fig 1): (1) democratic transition and pedagogical renewal movements (1978–1990), (2) neoliberal consensus shaped by OECD discourse (1990–2018), and (3) emphasis on sustainability and a potential renewed discursive shift towards transformative pedagogies (2019–present).

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Fig 1. Timeline of the Spanish educational discourses (1975-2024).

(Acronyms: EC – European Commission; EU - European Union).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267.g001

4.2. Democratic transition and pedagogical renewal movements (1975-1990)

The last education law of the dictatorship (LGE, 1970) is widely regarded as a ‘watershed’ that modernised Spain’s education system along the recommendations of international institutions [68]. Following a human capital framework, education was articulated as “the most noble and productive of investments” [69] in economic development and structured along the “needs arising from the structure of employment” [69] without, however, granting any democratic participation. The democratic transition beginning in 1975 can therefore be seen as a major dislocatory event, which enabled the contestation of these technocratic articulations. Key actors influencing Spanish educational discourse in this period (1975–1990) were the pedagogical renewal movements, known as Movimientos de Renovación Pedagógica. As censorship started to slightly loosen in the late stages of the Francoist regime, the works of Paulo Freire began seeping into Spain. Clandestine publications of works such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed [38] inspired a movement that saw the process of democratization as needing to extend beyond institutional change, aiming for cultural emancipation from the dictatorship and societal transformation through education (interview 1,7). As such, teachers and parents from different sectors of the civic opposition to the Francoist dictatorship, began establishing school cooperatives which served as critical spaces for pedagogical experimentation (interview 1).

Rejecting the increasing standardization of knowledge during the late Francoist period, this movement adopted a transformative discourse based on a relational perspective of embeddedness in the community and environment and seeking to provide experiential learning opportunities to solve place-based problems, as one interviewee explains:

“link[ing] what we do in science [...] with the environment, with the community, with the neighbourhood, with the needs we have, etc. Well, that was very present.” (interview 1)

Besides this community-based effort to construct a transformative alternative, there were successful efforts to carry these ideas into the political sphere. There was, for instance, a push to occupy institutions such as the ‘colegios de doctores y licenciados’, professional associations which brought together university graduates and mainly represented professionals in the education sector:

“through these channels all the alternatives to teaching were disseminated [...], some […] more methodological or teaching approaches, etc., but others of a more political nature, for example, the demand for a participatory school, for democratic participation” (interview 1)

These political demands by the pedagogical renewal movements were then adopted by progressive political parties, including the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), as their members integrated into these parties (interview 1,7).

A first attempt at educational reform was made by the conservative political party UCD in 1980, known by its acronym, as the LOECE. It aimed to grant wide concessions to private and especially catholic schools to create and impose their own mission statement according to their religious and moral principles, but was derailed by a constitutional challenge initiated by the PSOE, as well as the military coup attempt in 1981 [70]. When the PSOE was voted into office in 1982, it instead introduced an educational law (LODE, 1985) based on a different interpretation of pluralism in the school system, which centred not on the freedom of choice between public and private, religious and secular education, but on the democratic participation of the educational community in schools. This represented a more relational, whole school approach, viewing all members of the school community as collaborators in achieving educational goals, instead of the previous dichotomous and hierarchical relationship between student and teacher. The second article of the LODE outlining the purposes of education furthermore reflects a conceptualization of education as a means for societal transformation towards a plural and democratic society in the context of the aftermath of the dictatorship, including: “Learning respect for fundamental rights and freedoms, equality between men and women and in the exercise of tolerance and freedom within the democratic principles of coexistence”, “[t]he preparation to participate actively in the social and cultural life” and “learning for peace, cooperation and solidarity among peoples” [71].

The LOGSE education law introduced in 1990 by the PSOE similarly centred values and norms that should guide education in its opening paragraph, stating that:

“education must be directed towards the development of [the students’] capacity to exercise, in a critical manner and in an axiologically plural society, freedom, tolerance and solidarity.” [72].

By introducing the concept of values education (Educación en valores), the law clearly acknowledged normative aspects of education. Furthermore, it introduced a number of ‘transversal topics’, including “the development of creative abilities and a critical spirit”, “active methodology that ensures student participation”, and “training in respect for and defence of the environment” [72].

What we have seen in this section is that the process of democratization enabled the articulation of key discursive elements of the transformative paradigm, including the focus on education as a means of societal transformation, the relational view of learning, and the conceptualisation of knowledge as inherently normative (see table 4).

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Table 4. Discursive Map of Spanish Education Laws (1985–2020) mapped against modernist and transformative paradigms.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267.t004

4.3. The neoliberal consensus period (1990-2018)

As important actors from the pedagogical renewal movements moved into the political sphere, the grassroots movement pushing for transformative approaches was weakened (interview 1,4). This created an opening for OECD frameworks, that were on the rise from the 1990s on, to influence educational policy. Of particular importance were their Education at a Glance reports [73] and PISA rankings that placed national education systems in competition with one another according to standardized indicators [12,27]. These international evaluations garnered significant attention among policymakers in Spain, partly due to the country’s transition from strong centralization during the dictatorship to gradual decentralization between the 1980s and 2000. As one interviewee mentions, there were “people in all political sectors who miss[ed] a greater control of knowing what is going on”, prompting greater interest in comparable test scores (interview 1). Foregrounding test results was, however, also influenced by the wider neoliberal turn and its focus on competition, which affected both of the then hegemonic parties in Spain (the social-democratic PSOE and conservative PP), albeit to different degrees (interview 1,7).

Education discourse in Spain rapidly shifted from a focus on societal, religious, and democratic values to a focus on productivity, effectiveness and the optimisation of supposedly neutral, measurable results, following standardized OECD frameworks and aligning with modernist articulations of education. This shift is clearly visible in the LOPEGC, ‘Organic Law on Participation, Evaluation and Governance of Educational Institutions’ promoted in 1995 by the party in government (PSOE). It thus referred to a “demand” for “educational goods and services”, whose ‘quality’ needed to be improved through evaluation [74], though no mention was made of what exactly was meant by quality, implying an objective, value-free quality of education. This shows the setting in of a new ‘common sense’ around education, where quantitative evaluation was accepted as the single measure for quality in education. In fact, the preamble of a later education law promoted by PSOE (LOE, 2006) confirms that under-average results in international evaluations were the motivation for the LOPEGC reform, rather than any normative principles about education [75].

This trend intensified after the conservative People’s Party (PP) came to power in 1996. Two years after the first PISA results were published, a new education law, LOCE (2002), was ratified, stating as its motive addressing “worrying performance deficiencies” in evaluations compared to peer OECD countries [76]. The primary concern was an underperformance in maths and sciences, which was seen as problematic in light of an “economic reality in which the scientific-technological dimension of knowledge is paramount” [76]. Thus, we see here that Spanish education policy aligns with the instrumental reasoning of the OECD’s modernist education paradigm. The subjugation of education to the market economy is also reflected in the framing of education as needing to impart an “entrepreneurial spirit […] to meet the evolving employment demands of the future” [76]. Centralized evaluation aimed to “orient the education system more openly towards results” [76]. This was meant to improve the “efficiency of the public investment in education” by fostering a “work ethic” for “personal progress” [76]. Education was thus framed as an investment aimed at creating a productive labour force disciplined by competitive pressure.

As its name suggests, the Organic Law on the Quality of Education (LOCE), marked the beginning of the term ‘quality’ becoming a central signifier in education policy. Yet, as we have demonstrated above, quality was articulated in a very specific way. While the LOGSE had stated that “the active participation of all members of the educational community, and the fruitful relationship with its natural and community environment are, among others, elements that contribute to improving [educational] quality” [72], the LOCE (2002), articulated quality in terms of competition and assessment: “[t]he consolidation of a work ethic and improvement in quality are linked to the intensification of evaluation processes” [76].

The following reform, Ley Orgánica de Educación (LOE), was enacted in 2006 by the PSOE, now back in government. The new law continued to adopt the economistic language of its two predecessors by emphasising the importance of education in promoting an “entrepreneurial spirit” and establishing “evaluation and accountability mechanisms” [75]. Yet, overall, it presented a less neoliberal tone and emphasised the need for more equality in the education system. However, this goal of equality needed to be justified by the PSOE Minister of Education by referring to studies indicating that a more egalitarian system could be reconciled with good overall test results in international assessments:

“Spanish society as a whole is convinced that it is necessary to improve the quality of education and surpass the results of PISA 2000 and PISA 2003, but also that this benefit must reach all young people without exclusion. […] In the knowledge society, exclusions are contraindicated and PISA has shown that early separation of pupils does not yield good results.” [77].

As this quote illustrates, equality had to be presented as instrumental for achieving better PISA test scores rather than as a normative principle or political end in itself. This illustrates the challenges to establish equality as a normative goal within a dominant neoliberal discursive context about education still largely aligned with the dominant OECD discourse. Other sections of the law also presented a less instrumental vision of education. As part of a broader “values education”, the subject of Citizenship Education was introduced and centred on democratic values and human rights [75]. Going against the hegemonic discourse, however, meant that this aspect of the law was subjected to the most criticism from the conservative opposition (the PP), labelling it a form of “indoctrination”, since it was not based on any “scientific discipline” [78].

From the 2010s onward, teachers began to experience the consequences of the hegemony of the modernist educational paradigm (interview 2,4). The prioritization of economic goals in education established in the 1990s and 2000s meant that in times of crisis, the education sector could be cut down to only those aspects valued by markets. In the wake of the Euro area crisis beginning in 2009, the conservative PP party thus introduced severe cuts to education while increasing teaching hours, which was met with large-scale demonstrations known as the Marea Verde (interview 4,7). These austerity measures focusing on cutting public spending emerged in the whole Eurozone. An example is the education strategy of the European Commission (EC) that was introduced in 2012 with the title ‘Rethinking Education: Investing in skills for better socio-economic outcomes’ [79]. While the strategy recognised that the “broad mission” of education includes other objectives beyond economic growth, the European Commission made clear that “against the backdrop of sluggish economic growth […] the most pressing challenges for Member States are to address the needs of the economy” [79], thus justifying cuts in all aspects of education not directly serving market needs.

Referencing under-average results in the 2009 PISA evaluations, the 2013 Spanish education law LOMCE introduced by the then ruling party PP followed the EC’s Rethinking Education strategy and backtracked on the previous LOE’s references to equity and democratic values, by for instance eliminating the subject ‘Education for Citizenship and Human Rights’. As the following excerpt from its preamble illustrates, the LOMCE emphasized that the educational system needed to be again reoriented fully towards optimising quantitative evaluation results:

“The objectivity of international comparative studies […] leads to the conclusion that a reform of the education system is necessary, avoiding the ideological debates that have hindered progress in recent years.” [80].

The LOMCE is explicit in its articulation of education as a tool to serve a growing market economy: “Improving the educational level of citizens means opening doors to highly skilled jobs, which is a commitment to economic growth” [80]. This goal of education was presented as “based on evidence” provided by international evaluations and “common sense” [80]. This evidence was primarily derived from the 2009 PISA study mentioned earlier that showed under-average scores in maths, reading and science. These were presented as leaving no other option than a “rationalisation of the educational supply” to achieve a “reinforcement of instrumental knowledge”, guided by improved transparency and accountability through external evaluation [80].

The analysis in this section has shown how, through various laws and reforms, education policy in Spain has been shaped by neoliberalism and the modernist education paradigm. In this period, educational reforms could only be seen as legitimate if they were based on quantitative and standardized indicators, and if they were seen to contribute to effectiveness and quality as defined by these indicators. While there were political disagreements on how to achieve educational quality – either by means of establishing equal opportunities or by promoting individual excellence – both major political parties agreed that quality is expressed in test results in international evaluations. This furthered the influence of PISA.

The analysis of this period shows that the discursive shifts that took place progressively shaped what counted as ‘common sense’ in education policy in terms of what is measurable and linked to ideas of productivity (see table 4). This helped to legitimise the idea that reforms to education policy were necessary: During and after the Eurozone economic crisis, deep cuts in education became possible and acceptable within a discursive landscape where the purpose of education was reduced to the idea of human capital, i.e., an asset for economic growth. Hence, a fertile context arose to rationalise education down to those elements that were seen as useful to the market economy. In this way, the financial crisis acted as a catalyst that deepened the neoliberal logic of the OECD discourse – a process in line with Klein’s [81] notion of the shock doctrine, whereby crises are used to erode the role of the State in public policy by advancing market-oriented reforms, which might otherwise encounter greater public resistance.

4.4. A new opening for transformative sustainability education? (2019 - present)

The latest education law known as LOMLOE (2020) was promoted by the first coalition government in Spain consisting of the social-democratic PSOE and the left-wing electoral alliance Unidas Podemos. As we will demonstrate in this section, this law breaks in part with the previous dominant discourse and recognizes the importance of sustainability.

This recognition was facilitated by the rise of the global environmental movement stemming from Greta Thunberg’s school strikes, which reached its peak in 2019 [82]. This movement created a momentum for Spanish environmental groups such as Teachers for Future Spain and Ecologistas en Acción (Ecologists in Action) to present proposals for a curriculum that included social-ecological perspective [22]. These proposals were made during the development phase of the law (interview 6) and they “were incorporated into the initial draft” (interview 1), as confirmed by one interviewee, the then Secretary of Education and main architect of the law. Existing networks in the government were instrumental in the uptake of these proposals: “because we also had very good contacts inside, we really got to introduce a lot of things” (interview 4). The process was also aided by an effective collaboration between different environmental movements and with the pedagogical renewal movements, which despite their loss of influence have remained active in Spain (interview 7). These collaborations “enrich[ed] both the environmental movement and the pedagogical renewal movements” (interview 4).

The breakdown of the two-party system in Spain formed a critical dislocatory event that enabled this discursive shift because it forced the PSOE into a coalition with an alliance of left-wing parties (Unidas Podemos) that had stronger connections to grassroots environmental groups:

“Many of [the social-ecological movements] also acted through parliamentary groups, etc., and from other parliamentary groups they raised issues that seemed logical and that were incorporated not in the initial draft, but throughout the parliamentary process. And so, I believe that this can be seen in the law” (interview 1).

The team developing the LOMLOE was largely the same that had worked on the LOE in 2006. Nevertheless, while for the LOE there was a strong effort to achieve consensus with the conservatives, the pressure from grassroots movements and coalition partner Unidas Podemos meant that this time, “some of the positions where the PSOE had been more reserved, more careful, […] were being pushed forward more” (interview 1).

Another key enabling factor was what Tiana Ferrer has termed a widespread process of disillusionment with PISA “among specialists and the public opinion” in Spain [83]. This allowed educational policy to move away from the OECD and its PISA report and towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the main international reference. Instead, the preamble refers to the negative impacts caused by the neoliberal approach of the LOMCE (2013), such as the limitation of plural visions for education, and a reduction of the educational communities’ capacity to participate in decision-making [84].

However, the inclusion of the social-ecological perspective in the LOMLOE was restricted. Specifically, the Key Competences for Lifelong Learning of the EU, limited this social-ecological focus [85], interview 1]: “While there was sensitivity in favour of introducing the eco-social competence, it was not possible, because in Europe the competence is ‘Citizenship’” (interview 4). Nevertheless, sustainability is for the first time given a central role in the educational law with the preamble stating that: “schools must become a place of stewardship and care for our environment” [84]. This goes beyond a knowledge-based environmental education approach, by conceptualising the school not just as a place to acquire knowledge about the environment but to actively practice environmental care and stewardship. In addition, other elements of a more transformative whole school approach are visible in the law by describing schools as “spaces open to the society of which they are a core element” that should become “motors of social and community transformation” [84].

Article 121 goes on to specify that learning about sustainable development should be treated in a cross-disciplinary (“transversal”) way [84]. For those teachers who already had a high degree of awareness and motivation to carry out TSE, the LOMLOE provides an important legitimization, since many have received backlash for applying teaching techniques or topics deemed unconventional or ‘too politicised’ (interview 5,6). The new inclusion of topics beyond the mainstream sustainable development discourse such as ecological economics and degrowth into the curriculum is thus seen as one of the biggest successes by the social-ecological movements involved in the drafting phase of the law (interview 4).

The law has also led to the introduction of a new approach to learning referred to as situaciones de aprendizaje (learning situations), which “integrate the curricular elements of different subjects” with the aim of solving problems creatively and cooperatively [86]. According the Spanish Ministry of Education, these learning situations “must be well contextualized and respectful of students’ experiences and their different ways of understanding reality” [86]. This not only takes up fundamental principles of TSE, such as cooperative learning and transdisciplinarity – by recognising the situatedness of knowledge, it challenges the fundamental epistemology of the modernist paradigm underlying the hegemonic conceptualization of education.

Applying these TSE principles in educational practice, however, remains challenging. One reason is that only a minority of teachers currently has knowledge about topics such as degrowth or experience in transdisciplinary approaches. It is worth noting, moreover, that transdisciplinary, project-based ways of teaching are more complex and time-consuming for teachers: “When you go with a textbook, it’s very easy because it’s laid out for you and you say: page 20, exercise such and such” (interview 6). This means that it takes time for teachers to become accustomed to these new approaches and requires adaptations in teacher training to be applied more broadly (interview 3,4,6,7). While the law stated that every teacher would receive training on the SDGs and how to incorporate them in a cross-cutting way into teaching by 2025, this has not happened within the term that was set [78, interview 5,6].

A second reason relates to the challenges involved with the novel method of evaluating students based on competences rather than specific contents. While this is recognised as important for assessing the skills to solve complex real-world sustainability issues [87, interview 7], in practice this continuous, more qualitative evaluation has added complexity and exacerbated bureaucratic burdens (interview 2,6). Paradoxically, these burdens can even leave teachers with less time for actually applying TSE approaches: “It’s a lot of paperwork to fill out, and when you get to ecology, you say, well, yeah, that’s for another day” (interview 6).

Despite efforts to move education policy away from the modernist paradigm, we also see a continued influence of neoliberalism within the education system. School teachers and administrators are being confronted increasingly with terms such as leadership, quality and autonomy of schools, with results of external evaluations published at school level creating competitive pressure (interview 2,3,7). The changing articulation of the term ‘quality’ helps us elucidate that in essence the neoliberal logic has not been replaced by the TSE discourse in the LOMLOE, but merely changed its character. As we discussed in the previous section, the LOMCE articulated educational quality as a matter of the individual excellence of students as evidenced by standardized testing. While the LOMLOE presents a more relational understanding of pedagogy, prevalent neoliberal logics of competition and accountability have shifted from individual students to teachers and school administrators, who are presented in the law similar to CEOs held accountable for their organisation’s results, stating that “[t]he management of schools is identified as a key factor in the quality of the education system, and there is a commitment to a professional management model” [84], as well as that “[t]he implementation of educational quality measures will be subject to accountability by the school” [84]. A similar confluence of neoliberal principles with elements of a transformative sustainability education paradigm can be observed at the regional level. The education law of the Basque Country, which was passed in 2023 under a centrist coalition consisting of the conservative Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and the PSOE, speaks explicitly of “transformative education” which it defines as one where students take a leading and active role and are confronted with their obligations towards both society and nature [88]. At the same time, however, there are numerous mentions of the “leadership” and “autonomy of the schools”, as well as 24 mentions of the role of ‘contrato programas’, contracts between the administration and schools, where schools commit to certain goals in return for funds – thereby framing schools like autonomous market competitors (interview 2).

According to UGT, one of the largest labour unions in Spain and politically allied with PSOE, the cuts to the education system after 2008 have still not been fully reversed, with teaching hours and student-teacher ratios remaining elevated (UGT 2022). This was also confirmed by interviewed teachers: “the classes are overcrowded, we have a heavy teaching load and very little paid time to prepare materials and organise activities that would be more holistic or better aligned with social-ecological education” (interview 3). Teachers and members of movements for TSE thus report that while the LOMLOE has potential and good intentions, the conditions are missing for teachers to put it into practice (interview 2,3,4,7):

“[T]he whole system has been squeezed by competitiveness, by market orientation […] especially with the cuts that came after the crisis of 2008 […]. [T]here used to be more resources. All this was taken away or weakened and now it’s just every person for themselves” (interview 4).

The continuing market orientation is also reflected in the increasing influence of the private sector in the education system (interview 3). For instance, the design of the sustainability module in vocational training has been delegated to the foundation of the natural gas utility company Naturgy, resulting in the promotion of neoliberal green growth narratives [89, interview 3].

Sustainability has entered the dominant educational discourse as an important signifier. Nevertheless, the example of introducing ecological economics in the economics curriculum in high school (baccalaureate), while simultaneously outsourcing the sustainability module in vocational training to the foundation of a private utility company interested in promoting a green growth narrative, illustrates that sustainability has become a so-called ‘floating signifier’ whose meaning is contested. Additionally, the translation of contents of the LOMLOE focussed on sustainability to the autonomous communities of Spain is being hampered in regional governments held by conservatives, as education is increasingly becoming a battleground of ‘culture war’ (interview 1,7). For instance, the conservative president of the autonomous community of Madrid announced the elimination of contents of the education law labelled as “ideological” and “social engineering”, including the concepts ‘climate emergency’ and ‘sustainable development goals’ [90,91].

Last, but not least, a look at the supranational level, nevertheless, confirms a broader institutionalisation of elements of TSE discourse. The European sustainability competence framework GreenComp published in 2022 thus promotes “futures literacy” and “political agency” for enabling “systemic transformations” [50]. And even some of the latest OECD reports are taking up parts of the TSE discourse. The 2024 OECD working paper ‘Rethinking education in the context of climate change: Leverage points for transformative change’, the authors argue for “empowering learners for action” [92], “place-based and collaborative approaches”, and “[w]hole-school approaches and school-community partnerships” [92]. However, this change in discourse may lead to a hollowing out and co-optation of TSE discourse if it does not address the institutionalised neoliberal structures of precariousness and competition that decades of economised discourse promoted by the OECD have entrenched in the education system.

This section has demonstrated discursive shifts towards TSE in the education policy discourse. But it has not moved away from key principles of the modernist paradigm including logics of competition (see Table 4). This means that the implementation of transformative elements remains challenging.

5.1. Discursive shifts and continuities

Our discourse analysis has shown how elements of the modernist and transformative paradigm have each been articulated and interacted in Spanish education policy over the last 50 years. In the period of democratic transition, the pedagogical renewal movements challenged the modernist educational paradigm adopted in the late stages of the dictatorship aimed at creating a workforce that could meet the needs of industrialization. While many of their more transformative approaches took place outside of the formal education system, elements of their vision of education for societal transformation were articulated in the education laws of the democratic transition period. This included the departure from a transmissive model of learning towards a more relational one, where students were for the first time given an active role, while centring democratic values, interdisciplinary elements and critical thinking. The increasing datafication of education promoted by the OECD from the 1990s on, however, narrowed the social imaginary of education to that which was quantifiable, which favoured standardised, disciplinary knowledge and competition. Recently, the mobilization of environmental movements and their collaboration with what has remained of the pedagogical renewal movements enabled the introduction of elements of TSE, such as promoting experiential and embodied learning through novel approaches like ‘learning situations’ in the current education law. While this discursive shift is promising, data collected in this study points to limitations in the implementation of these transformative elements, including a) a lack of training of teachers in these novel approaches, b) bureaucratic pressures, and c) the continuing effects of decades of neoliberal governance, which together leave teachers with few resources to design and carry out time-intensive transformative learning situations.

Much of the existing literature on education policy in Spain critiques a supposedly consistent polarization of education, lamenting that no education law has received bipartisan support nor outlived the period in power of the political party issuing it, and there are continuing calls for more ‘objective’ policymaking guided by PISA data [70,93]. In contrast, our analysis has demonstrated that education policy does not suffer from a lack of OECD influence. Quite the opposite, the OECD has profoundly shaped education policy. Even though in the period of democratic transition an emancipatory, a relational perspective of education existed in Spain and had significant influence on policy discourse as social movements permeated into politics, the neoliberal turn underpinned by OECD frameworks has structured education discourses, with both parties agreeing with the importance of improving PISA test scores and restricting the scope of the debate to the question what strategies would be best to achieve these improvements – either by making the school system more egalitarian or by promoting individual excellence. In other words, PISA is not just descriptive, but performative in limiting the way education is viewed, which skews the use of results towards neoliberal outcomes [94].

This neoliberal view of education can be seen as the expression of a modernist paradigm, which has dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment. Just as the OECD has shaped education through PISA and related benchmarking, reducing the richness of educational purposes to a narrow set of quantifiable outcomes, the OECD has also historically played a central role in consolidating GDP as the hegemonic measure of economic progress [28]. Both cases illustrate how complex, multidimensional processes – learning and economic life – are translated into seemingly objective yet narrow metrics that obscure fundamental aspects of societal well-being. In the economic realm, GDP ignores unpaid care work, ecological degradation, and social inequalities [95–97]; in education, standardized testing frameworks marginalize relational, experiential, and transformative dimensions of learning. In both instances, the performativity of these metrics not only frames what counts as progress but also threatens to crowd out alternative imaginaries that could advance a more sustainable and just society.

5.2. Sustainability as a contested signifier

The case of Spain shows, however, that social-ecological movements can influence the dominant discourse, especially when dislocatory events destabilize its hegemony. The LOMLOE reform specifically highlights the role of creating chains of equivalence in challenging hegemony [59], by not only uniting environmental movements, pedagogical renewal movements and left-wing parties but also social-democratic political forces under the floating signifier of ‘sustainability’. Whether the introduction of sustainability as a signifier in the educational discourse leads to transformation towards a relational paradigm, where education aims at emancipation and societal transformation, or a continuation of a modernist paradigm, where students are being prepared to become productive workers in the new ‘green economy’, still depends on how this floating signifier will be articulated in practice. Similar research in other countries is needed to assess whether there is a generalized shift happening in education policy towards TSE. This case study of Spain has shown how the disillusionment with PISA preceded the uptake of elements of TSE discourse, however, more studies are needed to assess the relation between the shifting dominance of modernist and transformation discourses. In addition, more research is needed to explore whether the uptake of TSE discourse in education policy is leading to effective application of TSE at the school level. While this study identifies neoliberal continuities as a key constraint for applying TSE, the selection of interview participants was focussed on actors that have influenced the educational policy discourse towards TSE. Our study therefore elucidates the advocacy-driven openings for TSE in formal policy texts, but further research utilising broader, representative samples of teachers and administrators is needed to understand how these discursive shifts are actually received, contested, and implemented in everyday educational practice.

While education is typically seen as a fundamental leverage point in the literature on transformative change [6], it is important to recognise how deeply a reductionist perspective limiting the space for relational and experiential pedagogies has been institutionalised through neoliberal governance mechanisms. This insight is relevant beyond education as many sectors relevant to sustainability, such as agriculture [98], forestry [99], and urban planning [100] have been subject to the same neoliberal logics. As Feola [101] suggests, the need for a paradigm shift needs to go beyond the symbolic and cultural to actively ‘unmake’ the unsustainable structures and institutions currently in place. Thus, deep changes in education systems should be considered multilevel and multidimensional processes going beyond a single legislative reform [101]. In Spain, the move away from the imperative to justify every education reform on supposedly neutral PISA data towards a more open acknowledgement of values and ideology reflects a wider trend from ‘end of history’ post-politics of the 1990s to early 2000s to the hyper-politicization emerging from the mid-2010s [102,103]. This could open up possibilities more generally for transformation beyond technocratic reforms but also for radical counteraction.

Overall, recent policy developments suggest an important discursive opening towards transformative sustainability education. This shift, however, remains embedded within institutional structures and governance logics that continue to privilege quantification, competitiveness, and human capital formation. As a result, sustainability risks being incorporated into existing neoliberal frameworks rather than fundamentally transforming the purposes and practices of education. The Spanish case illustrates both the possibilities and limits of discursive change: Although social movements can reshape educational imaginaries and open political space for alternative visions, deeper transformation is unlikely without structural changes that challenge neoliberal governance mechanisms. Transformative sustainability education thus requires not only new pedagogical approaches and policy language, but also shifts in governance capable of supporting relational and emancipatory forms of learning for sustainability.