When learning becomes a task to tick off - the PISA 2025 results

The long standing global measurement PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) run by OECD in member and non-member countries to evaluate the school performance of 15-year-old pupils in reading, mathematics and science is out. The 2025 results follow the biggest cycle-to-cycle decrease ever in 2022; and it worsened. The 2022 results shook the world, and so are the latest findings, raising serious concerns about learners’ foundational competences, showing a steep and further decline in reading, mathematics and science performance alongside persistent inequalities, teacher shortages, declining family support and challenges linked to digitalisation and AI.

But, behind academic performance, we see 43% of learners, almost half of them, finding learning new things boring. 40% of learners also would not put the extra effort when the learning gets challenging, while we are seeing a near doubling in the amount of mistakes on literacy tests due to hasty reading. Learners are conditioned to cross learning off a checklist as soon as possible and do something perceived to be more interesting. These findings highlight the need for a holistic approach to education that strengthens not only achievement on basic skills metrics, but also inclusion, wellbeing, critical thinking, digital and transversal competences, and lifelong learning, to ensure that individuals can interpret and adapt to current challenges and find joy in learning.

Losing education among competing priorities

The abovementioned findings say less about learners’ capacity or even about the functioning of the education and training system. OECD underlined the way students are missing support to keep them engaged, the increasing disruptions, and the difficulties of keeping discipline. The digital disruptions are documented as more than just more entertaining than learning, they are built on addictive design made to take advantage of young learners exactly as they are developing their most important competences to fight back.

As the PISA results call for returning to patience in education and training, and sustained effort, the pace of the surrounding world has increased leading to an unfair judgement of education and training systems. In a world dominated by geopolitical crises, environmental changes, post-pandemic recovery, rampant digitalisation, it is observed how education and training gets deprioritised. The European Commission showcased how education and training, as a sector, experienced some of the biggest decreases in investment as total public expenditure in the years of COVID-19 and after. The Union of Skills highlighted the need for education and training to be more adapted to labour market demands, responding to specific demands that seem to be time-specific and uncertain whether this will continue in the long run. All while learners are exposed to the addictive social media that promotes examples of quick hacks and shortcuts to achieve one’s objectives. The current societal landscape demands steadfast support for education and training while addressing other crises, instead of putting learning in the service of short-term demands. These PISA results are a wake-up call for not prioritising education and training since the late 2000s and for aiming to disregard basic and transversal competences in favour of sector-specific requests. The pejorative usage of ‘boring’ is the effect of obscuring to people how important education and training is and how it should be treated as a good in itself, not as a means to an end.

Basic skills decline: the foundation of a house of cards in competence development

Basic skills are essential prerequisites for both personal development and societal resilience, yet we are seeing the lowest OECD-average performance observed so far in all three core domains (science, reading and mathematics). On average, reading performance fell by about 14 score points and mathematics by 9 points. On a continuous decline since 2012, the 2025 results are a downright collapse. Aptly put by OECD’s Director for Education and Skills, Andreas Schleicher, ‘reading is the mother of all skills’. His claim shows the house of cards on which competence development is built. These basic skills are needed to acquire the necessary transversal skills and continue thriving throughout their personal, professional and lifelong learning trajectories, and also to match the EU’s ambitions. LLLPlatform draws once more attention towards the importance of prioritising basic skills even as the Competitiveness Agenda calls for specific advanced skills, and underlines also the need to acknowledge that today’s children are tomorrow’s adults, and this means that we need an intensification of basic skills development in adult learning as well. LLLPlatform called for such an approach when we jointly analysed the PISA and PIAAC results in 2024. As we await for the next batch of PIAAC results, there needs to be an acknowledgement that current generations of young people will need more support later in life on basic skills.

Science was this PISA cycle’s main focus, and it remained relatively stable, though also experiencing a 3 point drop on average. After this summer’s record-breaking heatwaves and increased deaths, the PISA report highlighted that higher-performing students in environmental science tend to report more positive environmental attitudes and belief in collective effort to bring change. LLLPlatform’s 2020 Learning for Sustainability Position Paper showcased the methodologies that built sustainability as a basic skill and created a foundation for future collective action. This needs to be further pursued in the coming years.

An additional specific focus in this year’s edition was testing for computational problem solving. Around 26% of students across OECD countries reached the two highest proficiency levels, revealing slightly more encouraging results than for other skills assessed. The PISA results overview describes how motivated learners felt when using specific tools to solve problems, revealing that learners can engage and can perform under the right conditions. The engagement in reading, mathematics, and science seems not to match their needs, prompting them to find learning insufficiently stimulating. LLLPlatform has been recommending an adaptation to competence-based learning in its 2023 Key Competences for All Position Paper, yet this is still not pursued across all EU Member States or it is not done consistently, with fragmented reforms year-on-year of learning. Such instability is not conducive to basic skills development.

Determining when digital distracts and when it nurtures

The picture becomes more daunting and complex once AI technologies usage is incorporated into the analysis. The OECD showed that for specific schoolwork, non-users of AI outperformed users, while for general purpose usage of AI users and non-users performed similarly. When paired with opportunities to develop AI literacy, users of AI can slightly outperform non-users, yet the difference does not seem to be as significant as currently touted in AI-related discussions. This reaffirms LLLPlatform’s claims for developing critical thinking, creating institutional processes to guide both students and teachers, and investing in the ethical and appropriate use of AI within education. Stay tuned for our upcoming Working Paper on AI in Education and Training coming out this autumn.

Digital competences are not the same as digital skills: a student proficient in the daily digital tools usage can lack necessary digital literacy to make conscious use of the tools. Even after the abrupt transition to online classes brought about by COVID-19, shockingly enough, school principals reported a lower level of preparedness for the adoption of such technologies than in 2022. Given the role of these technologies in providing tools for better digital inclusion and greater participation for students, these results signal a realistic threat to students’ digital wellbeing.

The paradox of closing equity gaps: Declining outcomes for advantaged learners

Although disadvantaged students’ performance remained relatively stable in science and showed only a limited decline in reading, advantaged students saw more substantial declines across all three domains. Therefore, some reduction in disparities cannot be attributed to improving the outcomes for those in need of more support, but rather to the worsening of general results. Socio-economic deprivation continues to be strongly linked to lower performance, with students experiencing material or social deprivation scoring, on average, 52 points less in science. Learners with a migrant-background are also considerably more likely to face socio-economic disadvantage, affecting 41% of them compared with 21% of their peers.

The educators’ role as enablers

LLLPlatform’s long-standing call for the acknowledgement of the role of all educators (including parents) is once again proven to be a highly significant component of children’s growth and development. Constant encouragement and support from both parents and teachers result in higher levels of reported growth mindset among students, even when they struggle, and in higher mean scores in science performance compared to less-supported peers. But even with this evidence, we are still failing to leverage on educators’ support: teacher shortages remain a significant hurdle, while students reported declining levels of family support compared with 2022. Such a decline gives more ground to why learners’ resilience with more challenging material is declining, and why they are demotivated to learn more.

Without a good teacher-to-student ratio, fairer working conditions, robust school leadership, adequate training support and continuous professional development, it cannot be expected that teachers can meaningfully assist students and, therefore, enhance their performance. And let us not forget that, for a student to be inspired and supported, they should be able to identify with their role models, which can be better achieved through greater diversity within the education workforce. Parents also need support, as they constitute role models for their children. Their inclusion and cooperation with teachers and schools at an institutional level allows them to positively influence children’s attitudes, especially towards reading.

Effectiveness in education and training investment

OECD suggests that more funding is not necessarily correlated with higher student engagement. LLLPlatform acknowledges the need to use the current resources more effectively, but highlights its messages from the 2022 Investment in Education and Training Position Paper. PISA results have been declining since 2012, immediately following the long-term trend of cuts to education and training since 2008. At the same time, educators are in many cases paid less than tertiary educated peers and shortages are aggravating. Inflationary trends are on the rise, putting pressures on families and their availability to support children. We need to use our resources smartly and target them towards basic skills and those most disadvantaged, but we also need to acknowledge that if funding will not be raised, we cannot correct the declining trends that impact the environment in which a learner develops, and lead to demotivation.

What can we do to stop the decline?

Curricula get overloaded, and the EU promotes advanced skills based on labour market requests. It is time, instead, to provide more intense support on basic skills provision. The PISA results are a desperate call to strengthen, rather than narrow, education for education’s sake. Learning’s end goal should not be placed outside of the learning process itself, which is clearly what is currently putting learners off. We have a blueprint on making learning environments enjoyable and spark learners’ curiosity and resilience. Improving foundational competences needs investment in teachers, families, in partnerships for schools, and in innovative pedagogies, alongside stronger digital and AI literacy, critical thinking, and wellbeing. Member States must ensure stability in education, committing to the learner-centred and competence-based learning approaches, and considering how schools partner with civil society to ensure that basic skills development occurs in a lifelong and life-wide learning way.