The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) confirms that the quality of education in Euskadi is accelerating its decline while its educational authorities design their own evaluation systems to ease the embarrassment. The data from the 2025 report released today place Euskadi (459 points) at the bottom positions of the Spanish regional systems in science, only ahead of Valencia and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Far from the leadership of Madrid (495) and the Spanish average (477), the results confirm the PNV’s disregard for the scientific skills of Basque students over the last two decades. In 2003, in the first PISA report embraced by the Ibarretxe Government, the science results of Basque students were 484 points. The collapse of Basque education at the start of the century worsens in reading ability (-77 points) and mathematics (-41 points).
The Basque Department of Education controlled by the PNV decided in 2023 to distance itself from PISA and take refuge in its own “diagnostic evaluations” to avoid comparison with the rest of the Spanish communities and the rest of the world. But the results of the report released today expose the current Education Minister Begoña Pedrosa, who last Thursday, September 3, tried to soften the PISA blow by presenting data from an internal report that claimed an improvement in results in linguistic competence, mathematics, and, above all, equity among Basque students in the last two years.
However, PISA conveys a reality diametrically opposed to the sweetened internal evaluation that is part of the ‘Comprehensive Strategy for the Improvement of Educational Results’ activated in 2025. According to the international comparison, Basque education is moving in the opposite direction to the rest of the Spanish communities and even to its own results when the PNV relied on PISA to compare itself with the other 90 countries participating in this evaluation process. The 2025 results in Euskadi are based on the participation of 2,310 students from 56 centers. In the 2022 PISA, there were 3,352 students from 27 schools, and in Euskadi’s debut in 2003, 3,909 students from 142 centers participated. The calculated reduction of Basque students in PISA responds to the blatant interest in questioning its results while more than 10,000 exams are conducted in their own self-assessments.
The latest PISA 2025 data place Euskadi below the Spanish averages in Science and Reading and practically on par in Mathematics. Only in ‘equity’ (which quantifies the difference in results between economically advantaged and disadvantaged students) does Euskadi rank high in the Spanish ranking behind Madrid and ahead of Cantabria and Asturias. And it is precisely “equity” and, especially, the increase in knowledge of the use of Euskera that are the two objectives the Basque Government wants to reinforce with individual programs in each of the centers where 280,386 Basque students started classes yesterday, Monday. This is 115,100 fewer than those who in 2003 led the PISA list with 484 points in Science, 501 in Mathematics, and 496 in Reading Comprehension. At that time, specialists from the Department of Education who produced a nearly 150-page report on PISA in Euskadi already warned that to improve Science results, it was necessary to study increasing the hours assigned to this subject and create an “adequate methodology”.
Two decades later, the Department of Education prioritizes its efforts on implementing the ‘linguistic projects’ of each center so that all Basque students achieve level B2 in Euskera by the end of their studies after ensuring that 80% of students are enrolled in public and charter schools that use Euskera as the vehicular language.
