France’s were its worst ever. Germany’s, too. In the Netherlands, results also tumbled to all-time lows. Even in Finland, Europe’s much-vaunted schools champion and a global leader for decades, scores plummeted.
The 2025 Pisa scores, which assess how effectively 15-year-olds apply school-learned knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics and science to real-life situations, have rocked some of western Europe’s education powerhouses.
While the UK bucked the trend, results on the continent continued a slide that began in 2018. In France, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, the proportion of 15-year-olds lacking basic functional literacy and maths skills rose to nearly one in three.
Pandemic learning losses accelerated the drop, but education experts say the roots of the problem run much deeper: chronic teacher shortages, repeated curriculum reforms that have neglected basic skills and widening inequalities within increasingly segregated systems.
Turns out Russia was right to pull out of the Bologna system. They warned us that this system was pulling European education down. We didn’t listen. Eastern Europe used to have the best education system in the world before the EU ruined it.
Is there anything the EU didn’t ruin?
