Even in Finland, Europe’s much-vaunted schools champion and a global leader for decades, scores plummeted. The 2025 Pisa scores, which assess how effectively 15-year-olds apply school-learned knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics and science to real-life situations, have rocked some of western Europe’s education powerhouses. While the UK bucked the trend, results on the continent continued a slide that began in 2018.
In France, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, the proportion of 15-year-olds lacking basic functional literacy and maths skills rose to nearly one in three. Pandemic learning losses accelerated the drop, but education experts say the roots of the problem run much deeper: chronic teacher shortages, repeated curriculum reforms that have neglected basic skills and widening inequalities within increasingly segregated systems. Compounding it all, incessant smartphone use has dramatically reduced attention spans, replacing “deep reading” with scrolling, and pupil motivation has collapsed.
Pupils in Germany got their worst-ever Pisa report card, reviving a decades-old debate about the country’s weaknesses in schools, integration and closing the wealth gap. Samuel Greiff, the German Pisa study coordinator, noted an alarming rise in youngsters who lack basic skills for citizenship and employment, including the ability to understand a written text and do rudimentary consumer maths. The study found that in Europe’s top economy the link between academic performance and socioeconomic status was particularly strong: only 2% of pupils from low-income families achieve high levels of competence, against 25% from higher-income families – a correlation twice as strong as in Denmark or Norway.
Germany endured a first “Pisa-Schock” in 2000, when the report’s dismal ratings triggered a nationwide effort to raise performance. The 2012 report identified significant improvement, putting the country above the OECD average. But the 2025 edition showed Germany slipping back to average, with about one in four pupils lacking competency in natural sciences and one in three in reading and maths.
About one in five demonstrated insufficient capabilities in all three areas. The number of teens deemed “at risk” because they lacked the reading and maths skills for further education has doubled over the last decade, and reading for pleasure has declined at a faster rate in Germany than in other industrialised countries: one in two 15-year-olds said they only read when it was required. Strikingly, pupils from the most socioeconomically privileged neighbourhoods recorded the sharpest decline in reading comprehension.
Education minister Karin Prien said the report required an urgent response, highlighting the negative influence of excessive social media use and pledging to present new measures to protect younger children by the end of the year. In the Netherlands, the scores marked a historic low point, setting troubling new records in reading literacy, where a record 39% of 15-year-olds now lack the basic skills required to navigate modern society, evaluate the credibility of sources or process multi-page texts, up from 33% in the previous 2022 edition. Researchers noted that the Dutch reading score has plunged by more than 60 points over the last decade, meaning today’s 15-year-olds are effectively reading at the level that 12-year-olds achieved 10 years ago.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
