The councillor for Education and Vocational Training, Martí March, has signed the agreement for the free education service for the third year of infant education with the mayor of Pollença town council, Andrés Nevado. The councillor for Education, Josep Marquet, was also present. The municipality manages the La Gola school and will receive a total of 360,000 euros to cover the education of 2-3-year-olds at this centre during the 2022/23 school year.

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In the next few days, the signing of the rest of the public nursery schools and the complementary network of the Balearic Islands will continue. More than 30 town councils and almost all of the centres in the complementary network have already signed.

Once the agreements have been signed, the payments will be processed to enable free school fees to be paid as of 1 September 2022, with the Regional Ministry making three payments in advance, corresponding to two four-month periods and a final two-month period.

In total in the Balearic Islands, to make this measure possible, it is planned to invest 18.6 million euros per school year, so that both public schools and those in the complementary network will receive a contribution of 45,000 euros for each 2-3-year-old classroom. With this investment, the running costs of these classrooms will be covered during ordinary school hours for this educational stage, a minimum of 4 hours for 10 months, which means a cost per year of 2,500 euros per pupil, at a rate of 250 euros per month.

The plan is to reach 5,274 pupils aged 2-3 years in 160 schools on the Islands. The modules will cover the cost of 293 2-3 classrooms in public schools and the complementary network. In the 2022-2023 school year, there will be 186 educational centres for 0-3-year-olds, of which 108 are public, 52 are private and 26 are private.

In addition to free tuition for the 2-3 year-olds, this academic year 2022-23 there will also be an increase in the allocation for the 0-1 and 1-2-year-old modules, which means achieving 10,000 euros/unit in the public network (up until now it was 7,000 euros) and 5,000 euros/unit in the complementary network (up until now it was 2,000 euros). In addition, it includes other improvement measures such as the increase in the number of staff in the early intervention teams (EAP), with six more professionals, and the new call for the creation of new public places scheduled for November 2022.