PISA 2025 Results: Every three years, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) releases the results of PISA, a global assessment that measures what 15-year-old students know and can do in reading, mathematics and science. The latest PISA 2025 findings, based on more than 760,000 students across 91 countries and economies, were expected to offer signs of recovery after years of weak performance. Instead, the results paint a worrying picture, particularly for reading. Across OECD countries, reading scores fell by 28 points between 2015 and 2025, the steepest decline among the three core subjects. The share of students falling below basic reading proficiency also rose, while fewer students reached the highest performance levels.
Average reading performance across OECD countries fell by 28 points between 2015 and 2025, from 489 to 461 points. This was the sharpest decline among the three core subjects. Mathematics fell by 22 points, while science declined more modestly.
Reading performance across the OECD also fell by 25 points between 2018 and 2025, equivalent to more than a year of learning. PISA 2025 recorded the lowest OECD-average performance so far in reading, mathematics and science, with reading having peaked around 2012.
The share of 15-year-olds performing below Level 2 in reading increased by 10 percentage points between 2015 and 2025, while the proportion of top performers fell by two percentage points.
The OECD says the decline cannot be explained by one factor and predates the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries. Increased digitalisation, longer screen time and declining reading for enjoyment have coincided with weaker literacy outcomes.
Students are also showing reduced capacity to sustain focused engagement with demanding reading tasks. Longer texts and higher-level processes such as evaluating, reflecting and integrating information have proved particularly difficult.
The rise of "hasty readers" is another warning sign. Across 35 OECD countries, accurate and fluent readers declined by seven percentage points between 2018 and 2025, while hasty readers rose from 6.6% to 11.4%.
The findings raise a serious question: as young people gain faster access to information, are they losing some ability to read deeply, assess evidence and think critically?
