Poorer Teenagers in Portugal Repeat a School Year Seven Times as Often as Better-Off Ones, and Immigrant Pupils Trail by 39 Points in Science

Fifteen-year-olds from the poorest homes in Portugal are seven times as likely to have repeated a school year as those from the most comfortable ones, according to the detailed data tables the OECD published with its PISA 2025 results. Of students in the bottom quarter of Portugal's socio-economic scale, 26.8 percent said they had repeated at least one year, against 3.7 percent in the top quarter. The gap of 23.1 percentage points is twice the OECD average of 11.6 points.

The tables sit behind the headline scores released in September and were picked out on Sunday by the daily Público. PISA places students on its index of economic, social and cultural status, built from their own answers on parents' education, parents' jobs and possessions at home; income is not asked. Repetition is also self-reported.

Overall, 15.0 percent of Portuguese 15-year-olds said they had repeated a year, down from 34.3 percent in 2012 but still above the OECD average of 10.9 percent. In schools that PISA classes as disadvantaged the rate was 29.0 percent; in advantaged schools, 5.1 percent.

A 92-point gap in science

In science, the main subject of PISA 2025, the most disadvantaged quarter of Portuguese students averaged 442 points and the most advantaged quarter 534: a gap of 92 points, against 85 across the OECD. Socio-economic status explains 13.3 percent of the variation in Portuguese science scores, compared with an OECD average of 11.6 percent.

The OECD calls a disadvantaged student "academically resilient" if they still reach the top quarter of science scores in their own country. In Portugal 10.8 percent did so, slightly below the OECD average of 11.9 percent.

Students with an immigrant background

PISA counts a student as having an immigrant background when both parents were born abroad. In 2025 that applied to 18.3 percent of Portugal's 15-year-old students, up from 11.3 percent in 2022 and 7.3 percent in 2015, and now level with the OECD average of 18.0 percent. Two in three of them (12.2 percent of all students) were born abroad themselves.

These students scored 454 in science, against 493 for students without an immigrant background. That 39-point gap is close to the OECD's 43 points, but it has widened from 16 points in 2015.

Part of the gap reflects family circumstances: 32.3 percent of immigrant-background students in Portugal fall in the country's most disadvantaged quarter, against 23.2 percent of other students. Once socio-economic status is taken into account the gap narrows to 27 points; once home language is also accounted for, it is 23.5 points. Across the OECD, the same adjustments bring the average gap down to 9 points, so in Portugal far more of the difference survives the adjustment.

Students with an immigrant background were also more likely to have repeated a year (23.8 percent against 12.3 percent) and to score below the basic proficiency level in science (32.3 percent against 20.6 percent; by coincidence, the same share of immigrant-background students who sit in the most disadvantaged quarter).

What the figures cover

All the figures describe students tested in 2025. Schools have kept taking in newly arrived pupils since: 380 enrolled in the first week of October alone, most of them foreign. The headline results, which put Portugal at the OECD average in every subject but well below its own 2015 scores, were covered here in September, as was the mathematicians' call for national tests to count again.