Are England's Pisa 2025 results really worth celebrating?

Following the release of a new edition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa 2025) earlier this week, policymakers and educators have hailed England’s performance as validation that we are getting education policy and practice right.

Are these celebrations justified? In one way, yes.

Focusing on scores, rather than the highly misleading rankings, England’s results were, indeed, quite good in comparison with other countries’. There was stability in reading and mathematics, and a sizable improvement for science (even if this increase came after a decade of decreasing scores).

However, in the previous Pisa 2022 tests England’s scores fell across the board, and stability after a dip is always slightly disappointing. One might have hoped that scores would have rebounded to pre-Covid levels. This was not the case.

The distribution of achievement also needs scrutiny. If we look at the highest scorers (levels 5 and 6), the story is positive: England has a higher percentage of such students than other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. And, contrary to the OECD average, this percentage stayed the same (reading) or improved (maths and science) from Pisa 2022.

But the picture is more mixed for lower-achieving students (below level 2). Overall, England has a much lower percentage of these low scorers than other OECD countries, and while there was a drop in the percentage of low scorers in reading and science from Pisa 2022 to Pisa 2025, there was a small percentage increase in maths. As a mathematics education researcher, this worries me.

On top of these general trends, there are plenty of other interesting observations we can make about Pisa 2025. For example, for the first time there was a significant gender gap for science, in favour of boys. The gender gap for maths also widened in favour of boys, while for reading the gap narrowed, with girls continuing to outperform boys.

Pisa 2025: the difficulty of international comparisons

It’s worth noting, too, that between 2022 and 2025, students’ sense of belonging at school increased in most participating countries and economies, including England (although England remains under the OECD average).

Across the board, on average, participating countries and economies scored much lower than in Pisa 2022 and the years before that. This is concerning because not only is a narrative of continuous deficit not very inspiring for schools, it can also lead policymakers to panic - and panic does not always lead to thoughtful, considered responses.

Politicians should take note of the fact that East Asian countries, such as China and Japan, which have performed consistently well in Pisa for some time, have long, coherent 10-year curriculum cycles, which prioritise input from all stakeholders.

This brings me to one of the biggest difficulties with drawing conclusions from Pisa results: there are many cultural and curriculum differences between countries and although the team analysing Pisa are very good researchers, taking into account differing contexts and educational circumstances over time is not straightforward.

As a researcher, I simply can’t close my eyes to this or the many other challenges with international comparisons. For example, the effort that students reported having spent on the Pisa test declined in 2025 compared with 2022 and 2018, which will likely have impacted scores. There are also some signs that England’s sample of students was upwardly biased, with a much lower percentage of students on free school meals or with special educational needs and disabilities than some other countries.

With data like this, we can never really draw causal conclusions. And while it is possible to cautiously say that education policy as a whole, even with some lag, is associated with outcomes, the kind of far-reaching claims that have been made following Pisa 2025 about behaviour, technology, generative AI, teaching approaches and more stretch what the Pisa data can tell us.

Pisa data provides an interesting starting point for conversations about education. In 2025, England has done quite well, and schools, teachers and students should be thanked for that.

However, the certainty with which many conclusions are being drawn suggests confirmation bias is more at play than anything else.

What’s more, settling for stable scores after a pandemic decline is not very ambitious, even if many countries have done worse. One might even say it is quite a low bar and the “soft bigotry of low expectations”.

Christian Bokhove is a professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies