Within the 2020 Strategic Framework for Education and Training, the recommendation of 21st century skills guide the definition of competencies that schools in the member states of the European Union must develop with children and young people. This article focuses on the work of secondary public schools localized in the border territories of northern Portugal-Galicia (Spain) about these competencies. The Portugal-Spain border regions present some social, economic, cultural and educational inequalities, but also by the possibility of dynamic local promises and cross-border cooperation. Simultaneously, the educational centers, also in these territories with fewer opportunities, need to face challenge of 21st century competencies, understanding these as the set of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that allow students to rise their place in a society in continuous change. The purpose of this article is to understand how these border educational schools organize their educational activities to develop these skills, analyzing school official documents. A qualitative study was developed through thematic analysis of content of twenty-two official documents (eleven Portuguese and eleven Spanish). The results indicate that the analyzed schools include these competencies in their documents. However, it also seems that it is not a priority in educational action, and there are few strategies proposed for putting them into practice. Among the categories of competences analyzed, it stands out that life skills are the most present in the educational projects of the Portuguese and Spanish schools, coinciding with those that are most reflected in the documents that guide educational systems at the national level. This study proposes an articulation between global, European, national and local educational recommendations considering the contextual needs and specificities of schools in border regions. © 2022 Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. All rights reserved.