Madrid Schools Reopen September 7-8. A Teachers' Strike Could Start October 14.

If you have a child in a Madrid public school, you need two dates, not one. The first is set by the Comunidad de Madrid's official calendar, published in the Boletín Oficial de la Comunidad de Madrid (BOCM) back in June: the 2026-27 school year opens September 7 for Infantil (pre-school), Primaria, and Educación Especial, and September 8 for ESO, Bachillerato, and Formación Profesional (FP, vocational training).

The second date is officially scheduled but still contingent: October 14, when an indefinite strike (huelga indefinida — a strike with no predetermined end date) by teachers in Madrid's public non-university education system is due to begin, unless the organizers call it off following negotiations with the regional government. As of August 25, the organizers had not called it off. On that date, the strike committee formally filed its full list of demands with the Consejería de Educación, Ciencia y Universidades, aimed squarely at forcing that negotiation before the deadline.

The strike committee brings together CCOO, UGT, CGT, CNT, Solidaridad Obrera, STEM, Menos Lectivas, Queremos FP, and Educación Especial Digna. The wider campaign also has support and participation from family and student organizations. On August 25, the committee submitted a formal document to Madrid's regional education minister, Mercedes Zarzalejo Carbajo, laying out six blocks of demands. The strike itself was ratified back in June at a unitary assembly of the teaching sector; the August 25 filing is the committee trying to open an actual negotiating table before the clock runs out.

The core asks: capping the weekly teaching load at 17 periods for Secondary and FP and 22 for Primary; hard caps on class size (13 students in Infantil, 15 in Primaria, 20 in Secundaria, 15 in FP); a €600 monthly increase in the regional component of teachers' pay, alongside pay equalization between teaching bodies; at least one full-time administrative aide per school to cut the paperwork load on teachers; a facilities push covering climate control and asbestos removal; and a set of measures aimed at school segregation, including recovering Aulas de Enlace — intensive Spanish-immersion classrooms for students who arrive in Madrid's school system without the language — and reviewing the current bilingual-education model.

Most coverage of this dispute treats Aulas de Enlace as a footnote. For an expat family, it may be the most relevant line in the whole document. According to the Comunidad de Madrid's own program page (now folded into a broader initiative called Escuelas de Bienvenida), these are dedicated classrooms in publicly funded schools for students from 3rd grade Primaria through ESO who are enrolling for the first time and either don't know Spanish or have significant gaps from irregular schooling in their home country — built specifically to shorten the time it takes a newly arrived student to integrate into a mainstream classroom. The union demand is to "recover" them, which implies the program has been scaled back from what it used to be, though we couldn't independently confirm the scale of that reduction as of this writing. If your child is landing in a Madrid public school without much Spanish, whether one of these classrooms exists at their assigned centro is a genuinely practical question worth asking directly, not an abstract policy one.

Nobody can tell you that yet. The Consejería's public position is that the strike is unwarranted: at a June 2 press event, Madrid's regional education minister, Mercedes Zarzalejo, called the walkout "incomprensible" (incomprehensible) and argued that CCOO and UGT are demanding immediate action on measures from a sectoral agreement those same unions signed in April 2025 — a deal that set out a reduction from 20 to 19 weekly teaching hours for Secondary, FP, and special-regime teachers beginning in September 2025, schedules 18 hours for tutors in 2027-28 and for all of those teachers in 2028-29, and establishes a phased reduction in class ratios that the regional government says should reach all ESO classes and the first two years of Primary by the end of the current legislative term. Zarzalejo's argument is that this timeline was already agreed and is on track, and she characterized the strike announcement as a political maneuver timed to "divert attention" from other issues. Unions dispute that framing; where exactly the 2025 deal's rollout stands, stage by stage, is genuinely contested rather than settled.

Earlier disputes offer perspective, though not a prediction. As of mid-May, public-education conflicts remained open in both Catalunya and the País Valencià: Catalunya's regional government had reached a partial agreement with CCOO and UGT, but the principal unions behind that strike had rejected it as insufficient, and unions in the País Valencià were describing the government's negotiating pace as stalling. Separately, Madrid's own nursery workers (educadoras in escuelas infantiles for children aged 0 to 3 — an action initiated by the Plataforma Laboral de Escuelas Infantiles, a workers' platform, with support from several unions including CGT, CCOO, and UGT in different forms) had continued an indefinite strike over pay and staffing ratios for more than two months as of June 16. None of these cases predict what happens on October 14 — they're a different dispute, a different workforce, different demands — but they show why families shouldn't assume an indefinite strike, if it begins, would be resolved quickly.

This strike call covers teachers in Madrid's public non-university education system (enseñanza pública). It does not cover staff at concertado, private, or international schools, although those schools may face indirect disruption. The official Comunidad de Madrid calendar and its September 7-8 start dates also govern concertado schools (semi-private, publicly subsidised). Fully private and international schools generally follow a similar academic calendar but aren't bound by it, so confirm your own school's start date directly rather than assuming. If your children are in a concertado, private, or international school, ask that school specifically whether an October strike would affect them at all, since the dispute and its demands are centred on the public system.

Spanish strike organizers, not individual schools, are legally required to give advance strike notice to the employer and labor authority. If the strike proceeds, the Comunidad de Madrid is likely to issue a specific minimum-services order, as it would for any public-sector strike of this kind, but that order doesn't exist yet. If and when it does, it will specify which functions and staffing levels must be maintained. Until then, families should not assume either normal teaching or a complete closure. Watch for instructions from your centro and the Consejería closer to October 14, and make a backup childcare plan rather than assuming your school will operate normally. We'll update this piece as the negotiation moves.