Spain has definitely hit rock bottom in education. Never since the international PISA report began triennially in 2000 have our teenagers obtained such poor results in the three competencies examined: Science, Reading, and Mathematics. The decline is general in most countries, except for the Asian ones, but our crash is much more pronounced than the average of the 90 territories analyzed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And it coincides in time with the implementation of the educational policies of Pedro Sánchez’s government, which have lowered the culture of effort and promoted the reduction of concrete knowledge to prioritize attitudes, a combination that seems not to have worked.
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The OECD published this Tuesday its latest edition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test that evaluates students aged 15 and 16 at the end of compulsory education. It assesses 760,000 students worldwide, 30,000 of whom are in Spain, the country with the largest sample. Its goal is to provide a comparative snapshot of the competencies students have acquired and how they can be used in relevant everyday life situations. In Spain, we have no other exam that allows comparisons within and outside our territory. That is why its results are so important “to guide public policies,” in the words of Abelardo de la Rosa, Secretary of State for Education.
The trend had already been towards an increasingly worrying decline for a decade, but between 2022, the year the last report was published, and 2025, the drop has been much more pronounced, according to the Ministry of Education, which has made “self-criticism,” but frames the poor grades within a global worsening of educational systems and the effects of screen use, especially the abuse of mobile phones, which would have caused students to read less than before.
The most intense drop is actually in Reading, where Spain, with 451 points, loses 23 since the previous edition and falls below the OECD average (461) and the total EU average (459), which dropped 15 and 16 points respectively compared to 2022.
According to the equivalences established by this organization, 20 points equal one school year. That means our fifteen-year-old students are two school years behind those of the United Kingdom (494): that is, a 15-year-old Spaniard has the reading level of a 13-year-old Briton.
There is also a significant drop in Mathematics. Spain scores only 457 points, far below the OECD average and the EU average (463). This is a loss of 16 points compared to 2022, while the OECD has suffered a reduction of nine and the EU, 11. In this subject, we would be a year and a half behind the United Kingdom (488).
Science is the main subject of this edition of the report. In other years we were around the average of all countries, but this time we fell behind, although it is where our students perform best, with 477 points compared to 482 of the OECD and 481 of the EU. The loss compared to 2022 has been 8 points, compared to 3 for the OECD and the EU. We are also a year and a half behind the British (511).
The report’s authors warn that “the PISA 2025 results were lower than those of PISA 2015, and were among the lowest recorded to date in Spain in the three subjects.” Lucas Gortázar, deputy director of the think tank EsadeEcPol, describes this drop as “severe and very serious.” Ismael Sanz, head of Education at the think tank Funcas, believes that “it is an important, very negative setback that should lead us to reflection.”
The number two of the Ministry of Education also openly acknowledges that “the data are not good”: “Reading habits have not improved, due to screens, we have to think about how to recover slow and comprehensive reading. We are considering improvements and will address the issue at the Sectoral Conference,” he admits.
Our problem is clear, judging by the statistical analysis: the number of excellent students does not increase, but we have more and more low-performing students: young people who do not reach the minimum competencies to manage life. Compared to a decade ago, the proportion of these mediocre students increased by 11 percentage points in Mathematics, 15 percentage points in Reading, and 6 percentage points in Science.
Precisely, the countries that perform best in this evaluation (Japan, Estonia, South Korea, United Kingdom…) are those with the most excellent students and the fewest lagging students. An example: in Science, Spain has 4% excellent students and 24% low-performing students. It is the opposite of Japan: 17% good students and 3% poor students. Spanish students with low performance are much higher in Mathematics (33%) and Reading (32%), percentages that hinder the learning of the entire classroom and make it impossible for the whole system to advance.
This has been constant in the last decade, dragging down our performance. But, in addition, there are new developments. Until now, socioeconomic level was a fundamental factor in predicting performance: the lower the family income, the worse the results. It remains so: students from wealthy families perform better than those from poor families. But this time the worsening has occurred mainly among high-income families. “It reaches double, it is unprecedented. Poor-performing students from high-income families are the ones who fall the most globally,” warns Lucas Gortázar.
Why? Both Gortázar and Ismael Sanz believe that students from privileged environments attend schools “where digital tools are used more.”
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The OECD technicians attribute the decline in results to the abuse of screens. The OECD senior analyst and coordinator of the PISA study, Tue Halgreen, explains that the drop “may have to do with technological development over the last decade” due to “certain indications,” such as “the decline started around 2015, which is also when mobile phones began to be used massively.”
Halgreen argues that “it is important to distinguish between using devices for learning or for any other purpose,” but even so, he sees “similar patterns in different countries despite different decisions being made at the same time.” And the common pattern is as follows: “The less time spent on mobiles, the better the performance. The correlation is getting stronger. And the specific tasks that cause problems have to do with reading longer texts: if they have more than 400 words, which is what fits on a screen, we see more problems.”
Not just screens
In Spain, students’ screen use is not very high, with an average of two hours per week, while other countries have three or four hours. The time students spend on devices for non-learning purposes is also lower: 42 minutes a day compared to 66 minutes. And despite this, we lose twice as many points as the average.
Sanz is clear that the worsening cannot be attributed solely to screens, but to “an effect of ease,” which has been a trend in much of Europe. In Spain, the Lomloe imposed since Covid and consecrated from 2020 a less ambitious ESO, as it allows obtaining the diploma in four different ways and students can pass courses and graduate without limits on failing grades, while numerical grades lose importance and qualitative assessment gains weight.
This system, in practice, has multiplied teachers’ bureaucracy, who have not been taught in detail the new way of assessing or how to teach a curriculum where memorization has been demonized. Teachers have to assess students’ attitudes and values, who learn fewer concrete contents. The cohort examined in PISA 2025 studied 3rd and 4th year of ESO with the new curriculum.
“I am not saying competencies are not important, but an exaggerated emphasis has been placed on them forgetting knowledge. Reading, dictations, and paper have lost importance. Spain is a country that has bet everything on equity sacrificing quality. And we have ended up with neither equity nor quality,” says Sanz.
Abelardo de la Rosa denies, however, that the government’s educational reform is behind the decline. “Lomloe introduces a competency model, but the cause of this decline is not attributable at all to Lomloe,” he defends, attributing it to “a context of social complexity, uncertainty, liquid globality, and digital.” “Lomloe makes a very interesting competency innovation and it is being positive,” he maintains.
“They work very hard”
The truth is that the countries that remain year after year at the top of the list are Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China, or Estonia, countries with technologized students who share one more thing: “Parents invest a lot of time and resources in their children’s education, children invest a lot of time doing homework and work very hard. Teachers are valued in society, not so much for their remuneration, but because it is a profession considered valuable. And then there is an interest in continuous learning: even though they are at the top, the administration wants to keep learning,” explains Halgreen, calling to take example and “learn” from these countries.
The involvement of Spanish families has decreased in this edition: if in 2022, 77% of students’ parents asked them at least once a week what they had done at school, now that percentage is 60%. The number of families who talk at least weekly about school problems has also dropped from 60% to 50%.
Spanish teachers are also not as valued here as in Asian countries. Spain reports more teacher shortages (49% compared to 39% in the OECD) and more support staff shortages (72% compared to 39% average). This prevalence of perceived teacher scarcity has increased compared to 2022, when it was 41%.
And what does Spain do well in? PISA praises the curiosity Spanish students feel (72%, compared to 73% in the OECD), but we have lost 3.2 percentage points since PISA 2022. It also highlights perseverance: 68% say they make an extra effort when the work becomes difficult, compared to 60% in the OECD, but in this perseverance we have also dropped 3.3 percentage points since the previous edition. We are almost leaders in school belonging and there is less bullying than in other countries. This edition has measured for the first time Computational Problem Solving, where the Spanish score (499) is similar to the group of countries.
“An upward bias”
This year’s edition has been marked by cheating in Catalonia, excluded from the report for leaving out 23.2% of students with learning needs from the exam when only 5% can be exempted, a practice also used by Murcia (12.7%) and Balearic Islands (7.5%). This has caused national exclusions to increase from the previous edition to reach 7.9%. The OECD accepts the data as valid, except in the case of Catalonia, but warns that “it is very likely that the high levels of student exclusions lead to an upward bias.”
