2025 PISA results show declines across most European countries
State of Us · Friday, 11 September 2026
Why it matters
This is a major new outcome measure for tracking whether European societies are maintaining the skills associated with effective schooling, and it shows a broad deterioration rather than an isolated national result. It also supplies a useful warning for interpreting long-run trend claims: the scale of decline is meaningful, but comparisons across decades are not perfectly like-for-like and this item provides no demographic breakdowns.
What happened
The 2025 PISA assessment of 15-year-olds found that performance declined in almost all European countries compared with 2022; Slovakia was the only exception, with improved science scores and broadly stable mathematics and reading results. Estonia was the only EU country in the top 10 across reading, mathematics and science, while France and Germany ranked around 25th. In reading, about one-third of French 15-year-olds struggled to understand texts, compared with roughly one in 14 students in the four Chinese regions included in PISA; those regions are among China's most developed and are not representative of the country as a whole. The comparison also requires caution because PISA's assessed skills and testing methods have changed over time, and the report does not establish that differences in school intensity or parental tutoring caused the performance gap.
Players & places
- Estonia
- France
- Germany
- Slovakia
- China
- Singapore