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There has been dismay and pledges for action across Europe after it was revealed on Tuesday that maths and reading skills among pupils have declined across the world, largely due to digitalisation and a drop in recreational reading.
The OECD’s latest PISA report, based on a standardised test taken by 15-year-olds, found that student performance across OECD countries reached a record low in maths and reading.
Within the EU, pupils in Spain, Croatia, Luxembourg, Malta, Greece, Romania, Cyprus, and Bulgaria score below the OECD average in reading, mathematics and science skills.
Only Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Austria, Poland and Czechia managed to secure a mean performance above the average.
French Education Minister Édouard Geffray deplores what he called the “cognitive destruction” of young people and acknowledged that France needed to take action to reverse course.
“Young people who spend three hours a day on their phones during class, who are distracted for more than three hours a day, are losing the equivalent of almost two school years,” he said, deploring the “overconsumption of social networks.”
In an interview with Le Monde daily, Geffray targeted middle schools as the “major focus of the next five-year term to implement the most effective teaching practices.”
The PISA report logged the steepest decline in reading, with scores falling by 28 points across OECD members between 2015 and 2025, with pupils from wealthy families being the ones who fell furthest behind.
Some of the reasons for the decline are related to increased digitalisation, longer screen time and falling rates of reading for enjoyment.
“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources and thinking critically about what we read,” the report stated.
Meanwhile, Spain’s education minister said that a lack of reading comprehension was “the root of all educational problems” after Spanish students logged their worst ever performance since PISA testing began in 2000.
“We must continue working on reading comprehension, because it is the foundation of everything. If you don’t understand what you read, it’s impossible to solve a problem in math, physics, chemistry, or any other subject,” Milagros Tolón told Cadena Ser radio.
Tolón acknowledged that the educational decline may be directly related to new technologies.
“This may be related, as the OECD has already indicated, to screen time, rushed and superficial reading habits, and the increasing prevalence of short messages in the digital lives of teenagers,” she added.
She said that since 2024 Spain has been promoting cooperation programmes to strengthen both reading comprehension and mathematics.
Over 760,000 teenagers in dozens of countries took the Programme for International Student Assessment last year, the results of which were released on Tuesday.
China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea scored the highest marks on the test. Estonia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand also did well.
The key to why scores are falling so widely may be found in an accompanying survey taken by students.
Compared with the 2022 results, almost every country saw a drop in families’ support for children’s education, especially for boys, as measured by questions about how often parents talk to their kids about their schoolwork or take an interest in their learning.
“Parents see themselves more as a client of the school, not as someone who takes personal interest,” said Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs the PISA test.
Students who said a family member asks them at least weekly what they did in school that day scored around 35 points higher on the PISA science test, equivalent to over a year and a half of learning, compared with students whose families take less interest.
That number includes adjustments for socioeconomic differences.
Digital distraction is another factor. Over a quarter of students in high-income countries complained their classmates got distracted by digital devices in most or every science class.
In countries with strong policies controlling the use of mobile phones in schools, distraction rates were lower.
There’s undoubtedly a strong association between students using digital devices for leisure and lower test scores, Schleicher said. When tech is used for learning, however, the results are more nuanced.
Countries where high schoolers reported using digital devices for around two to three hours per day in school saw higher test scores, but scores fell once tech use climbed beyond that.
Almost four in 10 children in the Netherlands are at risk of leaving school with a low level of literacy as the PISA results show the country has fallen behind the European average over the last decade.
Junior Education Minister Judith Thielen promised to come up with an action plan in autumn to tackle low literacy rates.
“It is my ambition to stop the downward trend and turn it around,” she said. “I want to see better results in three years’ time.”
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