Latest PISA report confirms Spain's worst-ever education results
The latest PISA report confirms Spain's worst-ever historical results in Reading, Mathematics and Science, below both the OECD and European Union averages in all three areas.
Spain's education system is back in the spotlight after the latest PISA report showed the country's worst-ever historical results in Reading, Mathematics and Science. Spain now falls below both the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and European Union averages in all three areas assessed — a decline that an opinion analysis published by El Periódico de Aquí — Sagunto/Camp de Morvedre blames not on students, but on years of accumulated legal reforms, bureaucracy and shifting teaching methods in classrooms. In other words, the piece argues that the problem lies less with how hard pupils try and more with a system that has rarely settled into a stable approach before the next overhaul arrives.
The detail that worries the authors most is not just the drop itself, but its scope: the decline affects top-performing students and disadvantaged ones almost equally, which rules out socioeconomic inequality as the sole explanation. Since 2015, Spain has lost 45 points in Reading, 30 in Mathematics and 16 in Science — a steady slide repeated edition after edition that successive education reforms have failed to reverse. That steady, across-the-board erosion is what makes the figures hard to dismiss as a one-off blip: whatever is driving the decline looks structural rather than tied to a single cohort or a single reform cycle.
The analysis also points to a more recent factor: the role of screens and artificial intelligence in learning. According to the figures cited, 54% of Spanish students say they use AI chatbots to study at least once a week. The piece does not call for banning these tools, but questions what happens when a machine solves a problem or writes an assignment before the student has even tried to understand it — risking a generation of users dependent on technology rather than people able to reason for themselves. The concern, in short, is less about the technology itself and more about how it gets used in the classroom and at home, and whether schools are equipped to teach pupils when to lean on a tool and when to work through a problem themselves.
These results are worth placing in context. The PISA report (Programme for International Student Assessment) has evaluated 15-year-old students through standardised tests every three years since 2000, allowing dozens of countries to be compared over more than two decades. The most recent edition with consolidated data, from 2022, gathered information from around 700,000 students across 81 countries and economies, with results presented on 5 December 2023 — a scale that explains why each new report sparks so much debate in education systems worldwide.
The opinion piece does not give figures specific to schools in Camp de Morvedre or Sagunto, but the debate it raises also reaches families in the district: schools in Sagunto follow the same curriculum set by the Conselleria de Educación (the Valencian regional education department) as every other school in the Comunitat Valenciana assessed in the tests, so the wider trends in the regional and national system are also reflected, to some degree, in local classrooms.
This debate about education quality carries extra weight in a municipality like Sagunto, in the middle of an industrial shift towards electromobility and renewable energy: the Generalitat, together with the City Council, is driving the Battery Campus Sagunt, a dedicated vocational training centre backed with €35 million to prepare future workers for the battery industry — a concrete example of how the technical and scientific education the PISA report calls for also translates into real job opportunities for the next generation of saguntinos. It is a reminder that the debate over reading and maths scores is not purely academic for a city like Sagunto: the same pupils sitting through today's classroom challenges are the ones the local economy is counting on to staff the industries now taking shape in the municipality.
The analysis concludes by calling for less party-political dispute over education and more continuity: more reading, more mathematics, more science, higher standards, more support for teachers and more rigorous evaluation, instead of replacing each reform with the next before checking whether it worked. It warns that if every poor result keeps being explained away by blaming anyone other than those making education policy, nobody should be surprised when the next PISA report shows the same diagnosis. According to El Periódico de Aquí — Sagunto/Camp de Morvedre, with additional data from Wikipedia on the PISA report.