Azernews.Az

by Alimat Aliyeva

Swedish schoolchildren have recorded their weakest results in the history of the country’s participation in the international PISA assessment, which has been conducted since 2000.

According to the PISA 2025 results, 15-year-old students in Sweden scored an average of 464 points in mathematics, 18 points lower than in 2022. Their reading score fell by 21 points to 466. Both declines are statistically significant. In science, the average score dropped from 493 to 485 points, although this change was not considered statistically significant.

According to an estimate by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a difference of around 20 PISA points roughly corresponds to one year of learning for a 15-year-old student. This makes the decline in mathematics and reading particularly significant. Sweden’s overall performance is now close to the OECD average.

The deterioration is not unique to Sweden. All Nordic countries recorded their weakest PISA results to date, while the OECD average across mathematics, reading and science also fell to a new low.

One possible factor behind the decline is a major shift in young people’s reading habits. Students tend to struggle most with tasks involving long and complex texts that require sustained attention and concentration. At the same time, teenagers are spending less time reading fiction, newspapers and magazines and more time consuming short-form digital content, using social media and playing video games.

However, the OECD stresses that there is no single explanation for the decline. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, cannot fully account for the results. Swedish schools largely remained open during the pandemic, yet student performance still deteriorated.

Despite the overall decline, Sweden continues to have a relatively strong group of high-performing students. Some 14.1% of Swedish students reached the highest performance levels, compared with 11.9% across the OECD. At the other end of the scale, however, 19.4% of Swedish 15-year-olds — almost one in five students — failed to reach the basic proficiency level in any of the three subjects.

The PISA results were released just five days before Sweden’s parliamentary elections, making education likely to become an even more prominent political issue. At the same time, the OECD data reflect years of educational development and should not be interpreted as a direct assessment of the policies of the current government alone.

The findings also highlight a broader challenge facing education systems worldwide: how to maintain students’ ability to concentrate and work with complex information in an increasingly digital environment.