Germany’s latest PISA results present two problems at once. The country’s 15-year-olds recorded their lowest results in the history of the international assessment across science, mathematics and reading, and the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students remains much wider than the OECD average.
The results come from PISA 2025, released by the OECD on 8 September 2026. The date matters because the study is already being referred to in German public debate as the “PISA study 2026,” even though the assessment cycle itself is PISA 2025.
Germany’s average performance fell from 2022 in mathematics and reading and was roughly unchanged in science. Looking across the longer time series, however, the OECD says the 2025 scores are the lowest Germany has ever recorded in all three subjects. That makes the result more than a short-term fluctuation after the pandemic years. It reinforces a decline that was already visible over the previous decade.
The international context is also difficult. PISA 2025 was the largest edition yet, testing more than 760,000 students across 91 countries and economies. Across the OECD, average mathematics and reading performance reached record lows. One in five 15-year-olds was classified as a low performer in science, mathematics and reading simultaneously, up from 16% in 2022.
Germany sits close to the OECD average on several headline measures, but that can hide the distribution underneath. About 73% of German students reached at least Level 2 in science, the threshold at which students can use basic scientific knowledge in familiar contexts. In mathematics, 66% reached Level 2 or above, and in reading the figure was 68%.
The sharper signal is inequality. In science, students in Germany’s most advantaged socioeconomic quarter outperformed those in the least advantaged quarter by 125 PISA points. The OECD average gap was 85 points. Socioeconomic status accounted for 19% of the variation in German science performance, compared with about 12% across the OECD.
Those figures suggest that Germany’s education problem is not simply that “everyone scored worse.” The system is producing very different outcomes depending on family and school background. The OECD reports that the science gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students in Germany widened between 2015 and 2025. Performance fell among disadvantaged students while remaining more stable among advantaged students.
Classroom conditions provide another clue. Thirty-one percent of students in Germany reported that noise and disorder disrupted most or every science lesson. Twenty-one percent said they could not work well in most or all science lessons. Those numbers do not prove that discipline problems caused the national score decline, but they describe an environment in which learning time is being lost for a substantial share of students.
PISA is a comparative assessment, not a diagnosis of a single policy failure. It samples students rather than testing every 15-year-old, and it cannot by itself show which reform would raise scores. Its strength is in identifying patterns that persist across large groups and over time.
For Germany, the pattern is now hard to dismiss: lower long-term performance, large social differences and no clear rebound in the core skills that schools are expected to provide. The next stage will depend on whether federal and state governments treat the data as a ranking problem or as an equity and classroom problem. The latter is more demanding, because it requires attention not only to curricula and tests, but also to the conditions in which different groups of students actually learn.
