What PISA 2025 Tells Us About Our Approach to Literacy and Learning

By Ahmed Robleh, Deputy Head for Technology and Data in Secondary

Whilst the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report made for sobering reading for many countries, the good performance of the United Kingdom, and specifically the English education system, was arguably reason for Caxton College to feel renewed confidence in its commitment to the British Curriculum.

There has been a steep decline in performance overall by the OECD countries (with Spain faring below the OECD average). Reading scores especially saw a significant drop since the last report three years ago. The PISA report expressed concern about the loss of “skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources and thinking critically about what we read. The instances of ‘hasty reading’ - in which students read quickly but inaccurately - nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.”

In contrast, the UK has managed to more or less maintain its scores, placing it among the top ten countries in the world.

In an interview with ABC, Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the OECD and person responsible for PISA, commented that, “From the UK, we can learn how to have a rigorous education system. For example, the way reading is taught in England is not based on what people think is the right way to do it, but on real data and thorough research; they have a very evidence-based approach to teaching.”

At Caxton College, we follow the English curriculum and approach to learning to read, which involves the structured teaching of key skills: synthetic phonics, fluency, vocabulary and progressive comprehension.

But more than this, we work hard to promote a love of reading. We have a daily reading for pleasure session, in which teachers read aloud and moderate discussions about the texts to deepen understanding. We continue to invest in the Primary library, which is positively rated by 87% of students and has been reorganised this year with genre labels (such as animal stories, science fiction, or mystery) to make choosing books easier. And this year, we are launching our "Reading Ambassadors" initiative for students in Years 3 to 6 and “Reading Influencers” in Secondary, whose objective is for the students themselves to lead and inspire a love of books among their peers.

And our passion for reading appears to be bearing fruit. There has been no decline in reading levels at Caxton College at the end of Year 6; in fact, this year 33% of our students have moved on to Secondary education with a reading level above the age of 14.

Our research lead at school has already begun to sift through the PISA data to see what we can learn from it. We know that we must be wary of seizing hold of headline figures and coming to dramatic conclusions, and that it is very difficult to establish any strict causal relations. On the face of it, however, these results do seem to suggest that something about the English approach is managing to buck the negative trends.

What we know for certain, however, is that our students would not be able to make the progress they do were it not for the support they receive at home. No intervention is as powerful as parents reading, discussing books and sharing a love of words and ideas with their children.