The PISA 2025 report certifies an educational failure that Spain can no longer hide behind the excuses of the pandemic. Spanish students achieve the worst results in their history in Reading, Mathematics, and Science. In the first, they lose 23 points since 2022 and are two school years behind the United Kingdom, while one in three students does not reach the minimum level in Mathematics. A setback that compromises equal opportunities and the country’s future.
The deterioration is especially visible in Europe: since 2015 the average OECD performance has fallen in all three areas and the expected recovery after Covid has not occurred. But that context does not exonerate the Government. Spain falls almost twice as much as the OECD average and PISA 2025 constitutes the first evaluation of students who took 3rd and 4th year of ESO under the Lomloe curriculum. The law promoted by Sánchez lowered the demand, relativized the value of knowledge, and facilitated promotion and graduation. It was presented as a commitment to equity. The result is the opposite: the number of lagging students grows and the number of excellent students does not increase. Equalizing downwards harms those who depend more on school to progress.
The regional map reinforces the warning. Madrid, which confronted central aspects of the Lomloe, maintained contents removed from the state curriculum, numerical grades, and stricter promotion limits, resists better and leads in Science and Mathematics. The Basque Country collapses to become the worst in Reading. And Catalonia cannot even be compared: it excluded 23.2% of students with learning needs, against the maximum 5% allowed, and the OECD expelled it from the sample. Murcia and the Balearic Islands also exceeded that limit. The OECD warns that the Spanish exclusions probably introduce an upward bias. The real result may be even worse.
There is also a social factor that the Government cannot use as an excuse, but neither can it ignore. Classrooms are increasingly complex, with more students with specific learning needs, larger pockets of child poverty, and a growing presence of students of immigrant origin who speak a language at home different from that used at school. This forces many teachers to take on a caregiving role that overwhelms their educational function and requires more resources and better integration policies. It is revealing that the Secretary of State for Education, Abelardo de la Rosa, denies any responsibility of the Lomloe and attributes the collapse to “social complexity,” “uncertainty,” “liquid globality,” and “digital.” Precisely because this complexity exists, lowering the demand especially harms the most vulnerable students, who are those who most need a school capable of compensating for inequalities of origin.
The linguistic factor also deserves rigorous analysis, which some autonomous communities resist evaluating. The Basque Country, where the expansion of teaching entirely in Basque coincides with a severe deterioration of results, is already the worst community in Reading; and Catalonia, which suffered one of the biggest collapses in the previous PISA, has now been excluded from the comparison for manipulating the sample. A causal relationship between language and performance cannot be simply asserted, but neither can it be prevented from being investigated. In classrooms with a high presence of students whose mother tongue does not match the vehicular language, knowing its impact is essential to guarantee equal opportunities. Altering samples or excluding students with greater difficulties does not solve the problem but contributes to hiding it.
It would be simplistic to make screens the only explanation. PISA detects a relationship between digital abuse and worse performance, but Singapore, South Korea, or Estonia integrate technology and artificial intelligence and remain at the top. Their difference is also in work, involved families, valued teachers, and a culture that does not consider demand an enemy of well-being. Spain needs to recover reading, writing, calculation, memory, and solid content, and teach how to use technology without replacing intellectual effort with it.
School can no longer be a laboratory of pedagogical fashions nor a territory fragmented into 17 systems without a common evaluation. It is necessary to measure rigorously, strengthen teachers, and return merit and knowledge to the center of learning. The failure of PISA is also a political failure. The Government must abandon the complacency with which it has defended the Lomloe and correct a policy that, intending to leave no one behind, has ended up making everyone fall behind.
