Free fall for Greek education in the PISA report

New bad news for Greek education is sent by the OECD's PISA report. It records the continuous decline in the quality of education.

Compared with 2022, the report records for Greece -7 points in Science, -16 in Reading and -6 in Mathematics.

In other words, the situation in Greece worsened particularly in reading — the field that the report itself treats as a basic foundation of learning and which is linked to performance in the other subjects as well.

Computational problem solving, a new field of PISA 2025 and part of the innovative unit «Learning in the Digital World», measures students' ability to solve problems through modelling, programming, data analysis and error detection. With 461 points, Greece is at the same statistical level as Chile, Croatia, Malta, Uruguay and Vietnam.

The decade 2015–2025

The ten-year comparison leaves no room for doubt. The OECD calculates the average trend per decade with linear regression for those countries that have comparable data. For Greece:

All three trends are statistically significant. On a ten-year basis, Greece loses almost three times as many points as the OECD average in Science and is in the lower part of the table in all three subjects.

The report adds one more element for Greece: the decline concerns both weak and strong students in Science. Greece is ranked together with Belgium, Indonesia and Israel in the group of countries where both ends of the distribution declined, with the gap between them remaining unchanged. In other words, this is not a problem that is identified in one specific group of students.

Tiny top, broad base

Averages hide the shape of the distribution. And the Greek shape is one of the most worrying findings of the report:

• 3.3% of Greek students reach levels 5 or 6 in at least one of the three core subjects. In the OECD the percentage is 11.9%.
• 31.4% are below level 2 in all three subjects at the same time. In the OECD, 19.7%.

Level 2 is the basic proficiency threshold of PISA. The OECD considers it the point where students move from knowing basic scientific concepts to being able to use knowledge to explain, interpret and evaluate simple real-life situations. Below this level, students are at greater risk of having a weaker command of the foundational skills required for further learning and meaningful participation in society.

Almost one in three Greek 15-year-olds does not reach it in any of the three subjects.

The ratio of high to low performance in Greece is about 1 to 10. In the OECD it is 1 to 1.7.

Boys at 400

In reading, girls in Greece score 446 points and boys 400. The gap of 46 points is among the largest among the education systems that participated in PISA — the report explicitly names Greece among the seven countries with a difference of 45 points and above. The OECD average is 30 points.

In Mathematics the boys' “lead” is not statistically significant. In practice, the only large and statistically significant gender difference in Greece is in reading — and it is huge.

Internationally, the report records that girls report higher levels of curiosity and persistence, ask for help more often and set goals more systematically. Boys report higher cognitive adaptability and a stronger sense of belonging at school. As for growth mindset, the differences are small and in many systems not significant.

Greece's real problem is not grades

PISA 2025 does not measure only performance. It also measures the environment in which it is produced. And there Greece appears in low positions:

On the disciplinary climate indicator, Greece is second from the bottom among the education systems with available measurement — only Argentina is lower. The indicator concerns specifically the climate in Science: noise and disorder, students who do not listen, difficulty working effectively and the time required for the lesson to begin or continue.

Only four in ten students say that they do not miss school without justification, when in the OECD it is two in three. And only one in three believes that school prepares them for life after graduation.

This is not secondary. The report links attendance and exposure to regular teaching with the accumulation of knowledge and skills. The OECD also notes that reduced exposure to regular teaching, even when spread over many years, can weaken the accumulation of skills in reading and mathematics.

The Greek classroom: banned mobile phones, same distraction

One of the most interesting Greek findings concerns the digital dimension:

Greece has one of the highest rates of mobile phone bans among education systems — and at the same time a percentage of students reporting distraction from digital devices almost identical to the OECD average. The OECD finds that clear mobile phone policies are associated with less distraction. The Greek case, however, shows that a ban by itself does not imply better learning outcomes nor does it automatically solve the problem of distraction.

At the same time, the capacity of Greek schools to strengthen teaching with digital means is far below average. The combination is characteristic: strict prohibition of bad use, minimal infrastructure for good use.

Why reading is falling everywhere

The report devotes an entire section to the international decline in reading comprehension and is unusually careful: it does not propose one cause, but four complementary forces, which it describes as “hypotheses”. It also explicitly stresses that they do not assign blame to students, teachers, schools or families.

Among them: the change in reading habits, with a shift toward shorter and fragmented digital reading at the expense of sustained reading; increased absenteeism; more difficult classroom conditions; and post-pandemic changes.

The OECD's conclusion is that performance did not decline because of one factor, but because many small forces aligned: increased difficulty in tasks requiring sustained concentration, a tendency toward rushed answers, reduced willingness to make an effort, weakening curiosity and persistence. Characteristically, the systems with the biggest declines in reading also tend to show the biggest declines in learning engagement.

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— Greece at a glance (PISA 2025)