The PISA 2025 results, released by the OECD on September 8, 2026, reveal a worrying international trend: reading and mathematics performance among 15-year-old students has continued to decline across many countries.
Across OECD countries, average performance in reading and mathematics has now reached the lowest level ever recorded by PISA. One in five 15-year-old students is considered a low performer across science, mathematics and reading, compared with 16% in 2022.
The decline in reading is particularly striking. Across the 35 OECD countries with comparable data, average reading performance fell by 25 points between 2018 and 2025.
But what do results from 15-year-old students have to do with children in Grade 1, Grade 2 or the early years of elementary school?
PISA does not tell us that learning difficulties begin in elementary school, nor does it measure young children's reading or math skills.
However, it raises an important question for parents and educators:
What happens when gaps in fundamental skills persist as children progress through school?
Reading, writing and mathematics are cumulative skills. Building strong foundations early — and identifying persistent difficulties before they become larger obstacles — can make later learning more accessible.
What Do the PISA 2025 Results Actually Show?
PISA — the Programme for International Student Assessment — assesses how well 15-year-old students can apply their knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics and science to real-life problems.
More than 760,000 students across 91 countries and economies participated in PISA 2025, representing approximately 33 million 15-year-olds worldwide.
The overall results show a broad decline.
Reading performance has fallen particularly sharply. According to the OECD, the skills showing decline include the ability to evaluate information, connect information across different sources and think critically about what is being read.
This is not simply a story about one country or one education system.
What Do PISA 2025 Results Show in the United States and Canada?
The picture differs from country to country.
In the United States, students remained above the OECD average in reading and science and close to the OECD average in mathematics. However, reading and mathematics performance was lower than in 2018 and among the lowest ever recorded for the United States in PISA. Compared with 2015, the proportion of low-performing students increased by 7 percentage points in reading and 6 points in mathematics.
In Canada, students continued to perform above the OECD average in reading, mathematics and science. Yet the long-term trend also deserves attention: compared with 2015, the proportion of low-performing students increased by 11 percentage points in reading and 12 points in mathematics.
So PISA 2025 should not simply be reduced to international rankings.
A more useful question is:
Why are more students struggling to reach basic levels of proficiency, particularly in reading and mathematics?
And, from an early-learning perspective, what can parents and educators do when they notice that a child is beginning to struggle?
Learning Gaps Can Build Over Time
A child who struggles with reading in Grade 1 will not necessarily struggle at age 15.
It would be incorrect to use PISA to make that claim.
But academic skills do not develop independently from one another.
Children gradually build new knowledge on skills they have already acquired.
Consider reading.
A beginning reader first needs to develop skills such as:
letters and sounds → decoding → word recognition → reading fluency → comprehension
As texts become more complex, children are increasingly expected to use reading to learn new information, not simply to practise reading itself.
The same principle applies to writing.
Children gradually move from forming letters and writing simple words to constructing sentences, explaining ideas and eventually using writing across different school subjects.
This is why persistent difficulties in early literacy deserve attention.
Why Are Early Reading and Writing Skills So Important?
Reading and writing quickly become much more than two subjects on a school timetable.
Children need literacy skills to:
- understand instructions;
- read a math word problem;
- find information in a text;
- learn new vocabulary;
- explain their reasoning;
- answer questions;
- research information;
- and eventually learn independently.
A child may therefore understand a mathematical concept but still struggle with a word problem because reading the instructions requires too much effort.
Similarly, a child who can decode individual words may still need support developing reading comprehension.
This distinction matters.
Rather than thinking:
“My child is bad at reading.”
it is more useful to ask:
“Which part of reading is difficult?”
Is it recognising letters?
Connecting letters and sounds?
Decoding words?
Reading fluently?
Understanding what has been read?
Each difficulty may require a different kind of support.
For children who have persistent difficulty learning and remembering letters, our guide on helping a child with dyslexia learn and remember letters explores the importance of explicit instruction, letter-sound relationships, repetition and additional hands-on practice.
Writing Difficulties Should Not Be Overlooked Either
Writing requires children to coordinate several processes at once.
They may need to remember what they want to say, choose the correct words, retrieve spellings, form letters and organise those letters on the page.
For a beginning writer, this can represent a considerable cognitive effort.
That is why it is useful to distinguish between different difficulties.
A child might know the answer but struggle to write it.
Another might form letters correctly but find spelling difficult.
Another may be able to copy words but struggle to produce them independently.
The goal is not to make young children write for longer periods. It is to understand which part of the process needs additional practice.
For children who benefit from progressive handwriting practice, our handwriting and writing resources for ages 5–7 include activities designed around letter formation, early writing and the connection between reading and writing.
Early Math Skills Matter Too
The same cumulative principle applies to mathematics.
Before children can confidently solve increasingly complex calculations, they need to develop an understanding of numbers and quantities.
In the early elementary years, this includes skills such as:
counting → number recognition → comparing quantities → number relationships → addition and subtraction → problem solving
A child who has memorised a procedure without understanding the underlying concept may find it difficult to transfer that knowledge to a new situation.
This is why early mathematics should not focus exclusively on finding the correct answer.
Children may also benefit from:
- manipulating quantities;
- comparing numbers;
- using number lines;
- drawing mathematical situations;
- explaining how they found an answer;
- playing number games;
- and encountering the same concept in different contexts.
Parents looking for practical ways to strengthen early number sense can read our guide to helping children learn numbers up to 100.
You can also explore our primary math resources for Grades 1–3, which include printable activities for number sense, addition, subtraction, multiplication and problem solving.
Addressing a Learning Gap Does Not Mean Giving a Child More Work
When a child struggles, a natural reaction is to provide more practice.
Sometimes practice is exactly what is needed.
But more of the same activity is not always the answer.
If a child has completed a page of exercises without understanding the underlying concept, completing three more pages may simply reinforce frustration.
Instead, it can be useful to change the way the concept is presented.
For example:
Abstract → concrete
Use objects, cards, drawings or manipulatives.
Long activity → short practice
Break learning into manageable sessions.
Passive → active
Ask the child to sort, match, compare, explain or make a choice.
One format → several formats
Practise the same concept through writing, cards, a game, oral questions or manipulation.
The objective is not to turn home into a second classroom.
It is to give children different opportunities to understand, practise and succeed.
Repetition Matters — But It Does Not Always Have to Look the Same
Many fundamental skills require repeated practice.
Children need repeated exposure to letters and sounds.
They need opportunities to read.
They need to write.
They need to retrieve number facts.
Later, they need repeated practice to develop multiplication fluency.
But repetition does not necessarily mean completing the same worksheet over and over again.
A child can practise one concept through:
a matching activity → a memory game → a domino game → a bingo game → a short worksheet → an oral challenge
The learning objective remains similar while the context changes.
This is one reason educational games can be useful alongside explicit teaching and structured practice.
They provide another opportunity to retrieve and apply knowledge.
If you'd like to explore this approach further, our article on why learning through play can support children's learning looks at how active participation, motivation and different forms of play can contribute to learning.
For practical examples, you can also discover 10 printable learning games for Grade 1.
How Can Parents Identify the Real Difficulty?
Instead of asking whether a child is simply “good” or “bad” at a subject, try breaking the skill down.
For reading, ask:
Can they recognise letters?
Do they know the sounds associated with those letters?
Can they blend sounds to read simple words?
Can they read a sentence?
Can they explain what that sentence means?
For writing, observe:
Can they form letters?
Can they write the sounds they hear?
Can they spell familiar words?
Can they write a simple sentence independently?
For mathematics, consider:
Do they understand what a number represents?
Can they compare quantities?
Do they understand addition and subtraction conceptually?
Can they calculate but struggle with word problems?
Can they explain how they found their answer?
Breaking a broad difficulty into smaller components can help parents and educators identify what actually needs to be practised.
What If a Child Struggles to Concentrate During Learning?
Sometimes the difficulty is not simply understanding the academic concept.
A child may know how to complete an activity but struggle to maintain attention long enough to do it.
Long activities, fatigue, instructions containing too many steps or tasks that are currently too difficult can all influence how a child engages.
Shortening the activity, making the goal clearer or introducing hands-on practice may sometimes make the task easier to approach.
Our article Why Does My Child Struggle to Concentrate? explores attention in more detail and offers practical ways to adapt learning activities.
Early Support Does Not Mean Putting More Pressure on Children
There is an important distinction between addressing a learning difficulty early and pushing a child to advance faster.
The objective is not to expect every six-year-old to read fluently, write perfectly or calculate ahead of their grade level.
Children develop at different rates.
Mistakes, hesitation and temporary difficulties are normal parts of learning.
What deserves attention is a difficulty that persists despite appropriate teaching and practice, particularly when it begins to affect the child's ability to access other learning.
In that situation, support might mean:
returning to an earlier step;
reducing the difficulty temporarily;
using clearer or more explicit instruction;
providing additional practice;
changing the learning format;
or discussing the difficulty with the child's teacher or another appropriate professional.
Parents preparing a child for the beginning of elementary school may also find our guide How to Prepare Your Child for First Grade Without Turning Summer Into School useful. The same principle applies throughout the year: building foundations does not require turning every moment at home into a lesson.
What Can PISA 2025 Ultimately Teach Us?
PISA assesses students at 15 years old.
It therefore cannot tell us how an individual child learned to read in Grade 1 or why a particular teenager struggles with mathematics.
Nor should PISA 2025 be used to frighten parents into giving young children more academic work.
But the results do highlight a broader issue that deserves attention.
Across many education systems, reading and mathematics performance has declined, and more students are struggling to reach basic levels of proficiency.
Reading, writing and mathematics are foundational skills.
They develop over years, through instruction, practice, feedback and increasingly complex learning experiences.
When a child struggles with one of these foundations, the goal should not simply be to make them work harder.
It should be to identify what they have not yet understood or automated, provide appropriate support and give them opportunities to build that skill progressively.
Strong foundations are not about getting ahead.
They are about making sure children have the tools they need to keep learning as school becomes more complex.
🇫🇷 PISA 2025 in France
The decline in reading and mathematics performance is also raising important questions in France. For a closer look at the French results and the importance of addressing learning difficulties from the first years of primary school, explore our analysis of the PISA 2025 results in France.