Public outrage over teacher job losses, soaring university fees and a proposed new education law drew hundreds of thousands of teachers, parents and students into the streets on 24 October as part of a national strike.

The strike, the third to rock the conservative Popular Party (PP) government in two years, was called jointly by teachers’ unions, Marea Verde (Green Tide, a movement in defence of public education), student organisations and parents’ associations. In recent years, the education budget has been cut by 6.4 billion euros (a third), 70,000 teachers have been sacked, and teachers’ wages have been frozen. Some schools have even been left without sufficient heating in winter.

Further fuelling anger has been the introduction of the misnamed Law to Improve the Quality of Education (LOMCE), the brainchild of conservative education minister José Ignacio Wert. The LOMCE, or “Wert law” as it has become known, has already been passed by the Spanish Congress and is awaiting approval from the Senate. It threatens to introduce a raft of neoliberal changes that are becoming all to familiar to teachers and students in Australia: standardised testing, privatisation, local management of schools and segregation into vocational and academic streams in secondary school.

Wert has defended the last measure by claiming it will address the problem of massive youth unemployment in Spain, which exceeds 55 percent. Subjects that provide an opportunity for critical thinking, such as history and geography, will cease to be compulsory. Those denied access to the “academic” stream will be the ones who miss out. The law will also increase religious studies in the curriculum and increase class sizes in state schools.

Protesters called for the education minister’s resignation and demanded the LOMCE be scrapped. A prominent union of students branded the law a throwback to the Franco dictatorship, which ruled Spain with an iron first for four decades.

University fees are also being increased, making it impossible for many students to finish their courses. In the last school year (2012-13), university fees rose 66 percent, scholarships were cut by 24,520 (62 percent) and public schools lost nearly 25,000 teachers. Financial aid for the purchase of school supplies has dropped by more than 60 percent, according to official data.

With more than one in four working-age people officially unemployed, increasing education costs haver angered millions of working class families.

Unions coordinating the strike claimed an 83 percent turnout among state school teachers, and 91 percent at the university level, declaring this strike to be “a resounding success” that was “six or seven points above the May strike”. Accompanying the strike were demonstrations of 300,000 in Madrid, 170,000 in Barcelona, 50,000 in Zaragoza and thousands more in hundreds of other cities.

Earlier in September, primary and secondary school teachers in the Balearic Islands embarked on an all-out strike against similar education cuts implemented by the regional government. The Balearic Islands education strike lasted for three weeks; its mass popular support was demonstrated by a mobilisation of 100,000 in the regional capital, Palma. During the strike, strike committees, composed of delegates from workplace assemblies, convened mass community assemblies in state schools right across the islands, and a strike fund raised half a million euros.