Two decades of poor PISA results – and the same old responses

Brenig Davies

PISA is an international assessment programme designed to show how well education systems are preparing 15-year-olds for life after school.

It is not an assessment of the quality of schools and teaching. Critically, neither is it an assessment of individual pupils’ achievement. It is a scheme to rank education systems in 91 countries. It is administered every three years.

In the UK, the four countries are assessed and reported on separately. In this article Wales’ results are compared with those of England.

Wales first took part in PISA in 2006, seven years after devolution. The timeline below records the first response of the respective Welsh education minister to each PISA cycle.

The 2025 assessment results were published on 8 September 2026. The scores reveal Welsh 15-year-olds doing less well than those in the rest of the UK.

What ministers said

2006 — Jane Davidson
“Disappointing”
Results were disappointing; Wales had made progress, but improvement was uneven and needed to go further.

2009 — Leighton Andrews
“Extremely disappointing” — a “wake-up call to a complacent system”
He called for a major improvement in standards.

2012 — Huw Lewis
“Not good enough”
He said standards needed to improve, while stressing that systemic reform would take time.

2015 — Kirsty Williams
“We are not where we want to be”
She described the results as deeply disappointing but said Wales should stay the course with reform.

2018 — Kirsty Williams
“Positive, but not perfect”
She pointed to improvement in all three areas while acknowledging that more remained to be done.

2022 — Jeremy Miles
“Disappointing”
He said the pandemic had derailed previous improvement and called for renewed focus on reading, mathematics and science.

2025 — Anna Brychan
“These results are not where we want them to be”
She said they reinforced the need to improve reading and maths, while stressing there would be no knee-jerk response.

However, this article is not about the PISA scores. It is about the politicians’ initial public remarks about the scores.

But first, a summary of the 2025 context.

The 2025 results

The 2025 PISA assessment involved 3,406 Welsh 15-year-olds from 113 schools across Wales. Science was broadly stable, with Wales recording an average score of 476, not significantly different from 473 in 2022. Reading, at 459, was also not significantly different from the 466 recorded in 2022. Maths, however, dropped from 466 in 2022 to 456 in 2025.

Pertinent to this article, the Welsh Government’s first response to the results was to say that the scores reinforced the need to raise standards, particularly in reading and maths, while avoiding a knee-jerk response.

Education ministers’ first remarks through key words:

2006 — disappointing → 2009 — wake-up call → 2012 — not good enough → 2015 — not where we want to be → 2018 — positive, but not perfect → 2022 — disappointing again → 2025 — not where we want them to be.

Of particular note is that the remark “not where we want to be” was made in 2015 and again in 2025, while “disappointing” was used in 2006 and 2022.

Wales and England: PISA scores, 2006–2025

The tables below compare the mean PISA scores for Wales and England. The final column shows the difference between the two, with a negative figure indicating that Wales scored lower.

So, in summary: the gap with England in 2006 was -11 for maths, -15 for reading and -11 for science. Two decades later, the gap had widened considerably: maths -36, reading -38 and science -40.

England is in the PISA international top ten in all three subjects. Wales is the lowest of the four UK nations in all three subjects.

Of the participating countries, Wales is below the average in maths and science, while its reading score is close to average. The ranked positions among the 91 countries are: maths 35th, science 32nd and reading 27th.

What is more lamentable than the poor scores are each education minister’s hapless remarks, reflecting an absolute failure to address the fundamental reasons why scores have not improved over 20 years and, consequently, to implement a well-resourced action plan that is thoroughly monitored, with accessible, regular progress reports shared with all who have a vested interest in being informed of progress.

Brenig Davies worked in further education in Wales for more than thirty years, including senior leadership roles in the sector.

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