Portugal's Ten-Year Science Slide Is Nearly Three Times the OECD's, and Only One in Eleven of Its Fifteen-Year-Olds Now Reaches the Top Two Levels
PISA 2025 landed on Tuesday. Portugal matches the OECD average in science, reading, mathematics and computational problem solving, but that average is the lowest ever recorded. Since 2015 Portugal has lost 19 points in science, 36 in reading and 34 in mathematics.
The OECD published PISA 2025 Results (Volume I) on Tuesday. On the headline scores Portugal looks unremarkable: 482 points in science against an OECD average of 482, 462 in reading against 461, 460 in mathematics against 463, and 501 in computational problem solving against 500. Four numbers, four ties.
The problem is what the OECD average now represents. In the report's own words, PISA 2025 "recorded the lowest OECD-average performance observed so far in science, reading and mathematics". Matching it in 2026 is not the achievement it was in 2015.
A decade measured in points
Table I.2.9 sets out the average ten-year trend since 2015. Portugal lost 19 points in science, 36 in reading and 34 in mathematics. The comparable OECD figures are 7, 27 and 24. Portugal's science decline is close to three times the OECD's, and it gave up more ground than the average in all three subjects.
The shorter window is no kinder. Between 2022 and 2025 Portugal fell 3 points in science, 15 in reading and 12 in mathematics. Only 9.0 percent of Portuguese students now reach Level 5 or 6 in any of the three subjects, against 11.9 percent across the OECD. That is roughly one student in eleven.
Alexandre Homem Cristo, the deputy secretary of state for education, called the figures "historic, but in the negative sense", said the decline was not directly attributable to the current government's time in office, and set the target of beating the OECD average in 2029.
Who is falling behind
Socio-economic background explains 13.3 percent of the variation in Portuguese science scores, slightly above the OECD figure of about 12 percent, and the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students runs to 92 points. Students without an immigrant background scored 493; students with one scored 454. In reading, Portuguese girls averaged 479 and boys 445, a 33-point spread against 30 across the OECD.
The digital column
Portugal's sharpest divergence from the OECD sits in the digitalisation table. The index of schools' capacity to enhance teaching using digital devices puts Portugal at minus 0.50, against an OECD average of minus 0.03. Some 48.3 percent of Portuguese students use AI chatbots at least weekly to help them learn, above the OECD's 45.5 percent, yet only 57.4 percent report being asked in class to assess the quality of AI-generated information, below the OECD's 62.6 percent. Only 31.2 percent report no distraction from digital devices, and only 24.7 percent attend schools where phones are not allowed, against an OECD average of 49.5 percent. Portugal's own ban reaches ninth grade only on 1 January, which is after these students sat the test.
That combination matters because of what the OECD found about AI. Across OECD countries, students who do not use AI for specific schoolwork tasks outperform those who do, and moderate users beat both occasional and daily users on summarising and research. Where schools teach students to evaluate what a chatbot produces, frequent users edge slightly ahead. The OECD warns that those lessons reach advantaged students more often, "risking a growing AI divide".
School principals supply a second Portuguese outlier: just 12.9 percent of students attend schools reporting no teacher shortages, against 28.8 percent across the OECD. The school year opened this month with more than 2,000 timetables unfilled.
What Portugal does well
The survey is not uniformly bleak. Portugal beats the OECD on the absence of bullying (62.1 percent against 52.5), on the absence of truancy (85.3 against 66.1), and on students' belief in social mobility (76.7 against 66.4). Some 75.8 percent want to help protect the environment through their future work, against 61.6 percent across the OECD.
PISA 2025 tested more than 760,000 students across 91 countries and economies. Portugal was also one of 22 participants in the first PISA assessment of English as a foreign language, reported separately, and what those students do next is already visible in the higher-education data.
