PISA Results 2025 - Wales

Yesterday the PISA results for 2025 were released. PISA is the OECD's Program of International Student Assessment and according to the OECD is the world’s largest international comparative survey of 15-year-old students, assessing the extent to which they have acquired key knowledge and skills essential for full participation in social and economic life. The survey’s core domains are mathematics, reading and science, and the focal core domain rotates with each PISA cycle. Additionally, each cycle includes an innovative domain. How well did Wales' 15 year olds do in 2025? Well, compared to the other home nations, not very well. In 2023 our results were already lower than England, Scotland and N. Ireland, but these results according to the BBC show that we are falling further behind those nations. According to The Telegraph, based on the average scores, learners in Wales are almost 2 years behind learners in England. This is based on the OECD noting that 20 score points was “roughly equivalent to a year of learning”. A gap of 40 points would put Welsh students about two years behind.

https://research.senedd.wales/research-articles/how-did-wales-perform-in-pisa-2025/

Wales' results have not only been consistently lower than the home nations over a couple of decades but have been consistently lower than the OECD average in maths and reading since 2006 and roughly the same in science since 2009. Our education minister, Anna Brychan, has said that there will not be a knee-jerk response, that "these results are not where we want them to be" and that this new government has plans (which will be launched next week) in place to raise standards, which will include a new Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Plan. 

This feels much like 'groundhog day'. I'm sure I've heard similar responses from our education minister every time a poor set of PISA results are released. So, I thought I'd spend a little time this morning, digging through webpages to find out what either the Welsh Government, the Education Minister or others have said in the past when trying to address another set of poor results.

PISA 2025 Results

Sept 8th, 2026 - Anna Brychan, Education Minister

"Let me be clear, these results are not where we want them to be. But in many ways, they reinforce what we knew already and highlight our need to improve standards of reading and maths, as a priority." 

PISA 2022 Results

Dec 5th, 2023 - Jeremy Miles, Education Minister

"Our large scale reforms for improvement have only just started to be rolled out. It is clear that they must complement a relentless focus on improving literacy and numeracy standards. I have outlined in recent weeks a number of actions, based on the outcomes of reviews and our national data, that we are taking to improve on in these areas." 

PISA 2018 Results

Dec 4th, 2019

The Welsh Government’s target is that Wales scores 500 points in each of reading, mathematics and science by PISA 2021. 

Dec 3rd, 2019 - Kirsty Williams, Education Minister

“Positive, but not perfect” says Kirsty Williams as Minister welcomes Wales PISA improvement"

"We are heading in the right direction with our reforms. Our National Mission has charted the right course. The OECD are telling us to move forward with confidence.
That’s why we are delivering the biggest ever investment in our teachers, have developed the biggest ever professional learning programme and are striding ahead with our new curriculum." 

PISA 2015 results

July 2017

The Cabinet Secretary made a statement in Plenary the same day. She acknowledged that ‘we are not where we want to be’.

June 2017 

After the meeting Mr Llyr Gruffudd (shadow education minister) questioned how low ambitions could fall.
“After originally failing to reach its target of Wales being in the top 20 of PISA nations in 2013, the Welsh Government brought forward a new, less ambitious target, of achieving a score of 500 in each domain of PISA by 2021. Despite berating the minister at the time for lowering the target, the Cabinet Secretary has now herself chosen to drop it. How low can our ambition get?"

August 2016

The then education minister, Kirsty Williams, suggested that she did not expect an improvement between the 2012 and 2015 results. She said that there was a need to be realistic about how quickly the education reforms can embed within a system and when there will be an effect of the reforms in PISA results. 

PISA 2012 Results

In December 2013, Huw Lewis, then Minister, said that the PISA 2012 results were ‘not good enough’, but also that ‘we are too early into our school improvement journey to expect to see a step change in performance in this last round of PISA assessment.’ - https://research.senedd.wales/2016/11/30/pisa-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-important/

Dec 3rd, 2013  

Speaking about this year's results, Education Minister Huw Lewis said the results were disappointing and showed Wales had a long way to go. But he insisted the news reinforced the Welsh government's case for the ambitious reforms it has already developed. "Everybody working in and around the Welsh education sector needs to take a long hard look in the mirror this week," he said. "The Pisa results are stark and the message is very clear, we must improve educational attainment and standards right across the board."
Mr Lewis said new reading and numeracy tests, secondary school banding, extra funding for new schools would take time to have a "significant impact" in Wales. "There are no quick fixes," he said. "I expect to see the impact of our reforms reflected in the next set of results. They're ambitious and I believe they will have a lasting, sustainable and positive effect on education in Wales."

PISA 2009 Results

Leighton Andrews, Education Minister, called the results "unacceptable", said everyone involved should be "alarmed" and that schools "are simply not delivering well enough." He added, "This can only be described as a systemic failure; we all share responsibility for this and we must equally share in the difficult task of turning things around....Let me be clear - we need to address this as a matter of absolute urgency. It requires honesty, leadership and a new approach to accountability."

Hopefully you can see a thread running through many of these statements made by five different Welsh education ministers, over the last 17 years? That the results are "unacceptable", "not where we want them to be" or "not good enough". We then get the, 'this is what we are doing or going to be doing about it', statement, with the belief that next time things will improve. For example, refocusing on literacy and numeracy, or we are heading in the right direction with our new curriculum reforms that will have a positive effect on education in Wales, but that they might take some time to embed. The similar responses, over and over again. 

Leighton Andrew's response was quite possibly the strongest and arguably by saying that this was 'unacceptable' and that there was 'systemic failure in education' from the government, local authorities and schools. This, I would say, hastened in the arrival of Prof. Graham Donaldson and the development of the Curriculum for Wales. But I want to pick up on the word 'accountability' that Leighton Andrews used. Who actually is accountable or responsible for this continual decline in PISA test results? We know that the Welsh Government place great value in the PISA results. I'm certainly not aware of any Welsh Education Minister ever standing up after the results had been released and said, "Yes, these results are not where we want them to be, it happened on my watch and the 'buck stops with me'." No, the answer is we'll try this new (old?) approach of another literacy and numeracy strategy and that will fix things. I've been nearly 30 years in education and every five years or so it feels like there is another strategy. What's the saying, "that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results"? As well as offering a literacy or numeracy strategy as a solution, over roughly the last 10 years the solution has also included the, 'wait for the new curriculum to bed in'. But, how long do you wait until we might see the impact of a new curriculum? Because in the meantime, according to the PISA results we have had 20 years of declining results, where on average our 15 year old learners are now approximately 2 years behind their peers across the border in England, and 31% of them have a reading level that the OECD say is not good enough to fully participate in society! 

Whatever schools are doing when a new strategy is suggested is quite clearly, if we are using the PISA tests as a measure, not having the impact that the government would hope. That brings me onto, impact. How does the Welsh Government actually measure impact? Schools in Wales have mandatory online personalised assessment in reading and numeracy, taken by learners in years 2 to 9. The assessments help teachers understand individual progress, pinpoint strengths, and plan the next steps in learning rather than grading or ranking schools, as they would in England. Also, because these the assessments are adaptive and students answer different sets of questions, critics have argued that they cannot be used to rigorously to compare schools or accurately track nationwide educational standards. An ITV News article says this about issues around measuring reading for instance, "Wales is trying to improve how reading is taught without the basic evidence needed to do so with confidence. The curriculum provides limited guidance, and Estyn inspects against that vagueness." The article refers to the lack of data evidence in Wales as a huge problem, calling it a 'data desert'. Therefore, measuring impact of any new literacy or numeracy initiative is difficult unless something is done about how it is measured. 

In all my years of being involved in Welsh education, I can honestly say I can't remember any strategy brought in by the government that had its learner impact measured to help to judge whether it has been a success or not. For example, in my recent letter to the education minister, I wrote about the previous minister announcing that they had spent £167 million on digital skills for home and school since 2019, but I made the point that you may have spent that money but what was the measurable impact on our learners? Did the digital skills help to improve literacy or numeracy outcomes, or even learner digital skills themselves? The answer appears to be that we just don't know. We still don't know whether a learner with a laptop will outperform a learner without a laptop, and yet a relatively large part of a primary school budget is allocated to PS3 (Yrs4, 5 and 6) classrooms having a 1:1 pupil to device ratio. 

I guess the crux of this is that if you can't measure learner impact, then it's difficult to be accountable as there's no data to say whether an approach has worked or not. I really hope, for our learners, that whatever this new government puts in place to stem the PISA decline, whether it's a new literacy / numeracy strategy or the impact of the new curriculum, that it works. I really don't want to come back and read this post in 2029 and notice that the government are saying exactly the same things again.