SPANISH schoolchildren are now more than two academic years behind their British peers in reading after Spain’s education system plummeted to a historic low in the latest PISA international rankings.
The figures, published on Tuesday by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), make grim reading for a country that has seen a decade-long slide in educational performance accelerate sharply.
Spain fell 23 points in reading, 16 in mathematics and eight in sciences compared to the most recent assessment in 2022, with the declines significantly steeper than the OECD and EU averages across all three subjects.
The gap with the UK is particularly stark, with Spain scoring just 451 points in reading, compared to 494 in the United Kingdom.
The OECD considers 20 points to be roughly equivalent to one school year, meaning the 43-point gap amounts to more than two academic years.
In simple terms, that means a 15-year-old Spanish pupil is performing at roughly the reading level of a 13-year-old British pupil.
The picture is similarly poor in the other two core subjects, with Spanish pupils scoring 457 in maths compared to 488 in the UK, leaving them around a year and a half behind their British counterparts.
In sciences, Spain scored 477 points against the UK’s 511, again leaving Spanish pupils lagging roughly a year and a half behind.
Overall, the results represent Spain’s worst-ever performance across all three PISA subjects since the international assessment began in 2000.
The rankings tested around 760,000 15 and 16-year-olds around the world – including approximately 30,000 pupils in Spain – and is designed to measure how well students can apply what they have learnt to real-life situations.
Spain’s education ministry has acknowledged that the results are poor.
Education minister Abelardo de la Rosa admitted that ‘the data is not good’, pointing to falling reading habits and the growing use of screens, particularly mobile phones, as possible factors.
The OECD has also raised concerns about the impact of technology with Tue Halgreen, the organisation’s senior analyst responsible for coordinating PISA rankings, saying the decline ‘may have to do with technological developments over the last decade’.
He pointed to the fact that the deterioration began around 2015, roughly when smartphones started to become widespread.
“The less time spent on mobile phones, the better the performance. The correlation is getting stronger,” he said, adding that pupils particularly struggle with longer texts of more than 400 words – roughly the amount that can fit on a smartphone screen.
However, the screen explanation only goes so far as Spanish pupils actually spend less time using devices than many other countries, averaging around two hours a week compared with three or four hours elsewhere.
Some education experts have instead pointed the finger of blame at education reforms introduced by Pedro Sanchez’s left-wing government, which have placed greater emphasis on attitudes and values while reducing the importance of traditional knowledge and memory.
“Spain has bet everything on equity at the expense of quality – and ended up with neither equity nor quality,” said Ismael Sanz of the think tank Funcas.
Perhaps even more worrying than Span’s average score is what is happening at the bottom of the table, with the country producing significantly more low performers who fail to achieve the standards considered necessary to cope with everyday life.
Around 32 per cent of Spanish pupils are now classified as low performers in reading, compared to just 3 per cent of pupils in Japan – one of the world’s strongest education systems.
The OECD points to the consistent top performers – Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Estonia and the UK – as sharing a number of common characteristics, including high parental involvement, significant amounts of homework, teachers being highly valued and a culture of continuous improvement.
There are also significant differences in Spain itself with Madrid recording the country’s strongest overall results, scoring 495 in sciences, 469 in reading and 477 in maths, while Castilla y Leon and Asturias also performed well.
But the results have been further clouded by controversy surrounding Catalunya, which was excluded from the study altogether after concerns were raised over the number of pupils who were prevented from taking the test.
The region excluded 23.2 per cent of pupils with special educational needs, far above the OECD’s permitted maximum of 5 per cent.
Nationally, exclusions reached 7.9 per cent, prompting the OECD to warn that such high levels are ‘very likely’ to create a bias in Spain’s results.
In other words, the already grim figures could actually be even worse than they appear.
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